20. A Legacy Built on Integrity - Michael Paul

Today’s episode is a legacy piece with someone who has played a roll in making me the man who I am today. This episode is a little different than our normal episodes but it is one that is very close to my heart. This is an episode that I have been wanting to record since the podcast was started and I am so glad it has finally become a reality. I hope you enjoy listening to some of the interesting stories that Michael Paul has from his life and my hope is that you can glean from some of his wisdom and knowledge.

Nobody can take your integrity away from you. They cannot do that. But you can give it away by how you conduct your life. It's just how you conduct your life. Like I say, one of my chief goals is to make every kid that works with me successful. I want them to be successful, full and live on to be successful when we're working together. And I'll do whatever I need to do to bring them to that point. Maybe I mentioned this before, but I'm not going to miss tuning pianos one day, but I'm going to miss all the people that I've gotten to know over the years. I'm not going to miss logging one day, but I'm going to sure miss all the good times that we had doing whatever we were doing. I think about what people have left to me that went ahead of me and how important it was, what I saw in their life as it kind of determined who I became. And that is what I hope by the time their parents and grandparents, they look back and say, Now I know why that guy was in my life. Well, Hello, listeners of the Simply Overcoming podcast, how are you? Today's episode is going to be a bit different from our typical episodes. This episode is a legacy piece. Now it's a little longer than other episodes, but I trust you will find it interesting and enlightening. This episode is very, very close to my heart. So. All right, let's get to it. Hey, what's up, everybody? It's Erin, and it's another episode of the Simply Overcoming Podcast. Thank you for coming back. If you've listened to episodes in the past, we really appreciate you coming back to hear more. We hope that we are adding value to your life. Today's guest has been an influence in my life. He has been a mentor who has taught me things like problem solving, the importance of having a strong work, ethic and integrity. I have been anticipating this episode ever since I started this podcast, and I am beyond honoured to have him on the show today. This man has truly been a part of shaping me into the man I am today. Mike Paul, we have finally made this happen. And thank you for being on the podcast today. Yes. Thank you, Erin. So first of all, Mike, I just want to hear from your side briefly how you met me, too. I feel like we need to cover this right now. I still have a perfect memory of that. My memory for things a long time ago is pretty good. My memory for what happened yesterday disappeared into the ether, the short term memory. But, yes, I was on my Timberland working on a main road that crossed the mountain. And along came Aaron and his older brother, Jeff, on bikes, and they stopped. I might guess that they're probably about. I'd say Aaron might have been about ten years old. At that time, roughly speaking, they stopped and talked to me a bit. And at one point, Aaron said, hey, do you know there's a cabin down there? I said, no, you're kidding me. He said, no, we've seen it. And of course, it was my place where I lived. And at one point when they left, they said, hey, if you ever need any help, let us know. Well, I think it was probably about three years later. I know it was when I started tuning their piano, but I went to their home and I said, Would you boys like a job? Aaron and Jeff? And they said, yes, and that started what was a many year relationship. And we had a good work relationship. And I've been very thankful for that. The hard part is, Well, the good part is when they get up around 15 years older, so they're faster than I am. They're stronger than I am. And then by the time they hit their early 20s, they need a full time job. And when they're the most valuable is when they leave. But Aaron did stay on for some time. And God gave him a really special skill. I learned early on when we were filling trees. And it was like the first year, when he was about 13 years old, the tree went over the bank, and I needed to have somebody go crawl out there and put the tape on the end. The end of it was like 15ft off the ground. And Aaron just skittered right out there and hooked that table. I said, here's a guy who has no fear of heights. And so eventually we got Erin some climbing gear, and another boy who had worked for me taught him to climb trees and he's pruned up. I don't know, probably several hundred for me over the years. But it's just Aaron has been a real blessing. And that's how that all started. Yeah, that's right. And I remember that day. And in fact, when I started working for you, I was eleven years old. So I may have even been nine or eight or nine when we came through the Woods and met you there. And we had gone down and found the cabin a few weeks earlier. We were just exploring in the Woods and ran into your cabin in the Woods. And we just assumed that it was this abandoned cabin out in the middle of the Woods. But what an incredible experience to meet you in the Woods. I would really like to take it all the way back because I want to talk to you about your life, and I'd like to take it back to the very beginning. If you can briefly talk about where you were born, your family situation. And I know that something happened in your life that made you have to grow up quickly. And so I'd like to hear about that as well. I do want to say one thing. First, in thinking of when we met, I don't believe there's any such thing as luck, coincidence or accidents. I believe God has appointments for us in life. He puts us into people's life for a time and for a purpose. Or he puts other people in my life for a time and for a purpose. But there's always some purpose in that. And that's how I see that's one of the ways that I see life. So I don't think there was any accident that we met or that we've had the years that we've had together to do and not just working in the Woods. But then in the summer, we'd go backpacking trips, we'd go camping, go up to Canada. We just did a lot of really neat things together. Finally, because I had taken up downhill skiing when I was in my 60s, I asked the boys if they'd like to come along. And three of them, including Aaron, they chose snowboarding. But I think we even made at least one trip up into Canada to go snowboarding. Right. And skiing. Yeah, we did. So there was a lot more to it than that. And I always looked at our times. We would take breaks at lunch. And since I was a teacher, we were always doing some kind of teaching of some kind or another. If it wasn't English, we're sharing things from God's word. And that's how I see relationships for that purpose. Yeah. We did so much more than just work together. Our work, relationship and friendship was equally strong. And something that you taught us was there is a time for work and there is a time for good times and play. And we knew when it was working time, and we knew when it was time to have a good time. And you were always very specific about teaching us the importance of that. Since we're talking about that the thing, too. I thought I remember a logging job going on near me one time. And you guys said, Mike, nobody under 18 is supposed to be within 100ft of operating equipment. I said, the kids that work with me, they run all of the equipment. I usually teach them to work a chainsaw, and they're about 13. We all have all the safety equipment on. And then they learn how to drive the cat and the truck. And like I say, by the time they're 15 or 16, they can do everything that I can do, only they're much quicker and stronger. So that is it. When I was 14 years old, I remember you taking the keys to your truck. I don't know. Maybe the keys were already in the truck. And you just said, Aaron, I need you to take the truck and drive it up to the house. And you said, I'm going to start walking. Give me a five minute head start because I don't want to be around when you drive it. I don't want to see what happens. And I'd never really driven a manual before. And also it was parked on an extremely steep Hill. And so you took off towards the cabin so that you wouldn't see what happened. Well, I felt that way about everything. If I would teach you how to do something, we would work with it a little bit. And then I'd let you just do it alone for a while. Get away from you because there's a learning curve to everything. Those reality shows where they I don't like watching them at all because they chew up the green horns and make life miserable. I mean, who's going to work with somebody like that? What I always think is one of my goals in life is to help people be successful. And I want to see the boys that work with me become successful. Also, I also would teach them how to make decisions, to let them make the decision. And a lot of times we make decisions together. But oftentimes by the time again, like they were in their middle 18th, they'd be telling me how we were going to do things. I thought, that is great. That is just great. All right. Well, you had another question about life and yeah. So talk to me a little bit about where you grew up and your family situation and all that stuff. Well, I grew up on the southwest part of Spokane. My dad had a lumberyard hardware store and our house was attached right to it. So I grew up playing in the office of the lumberyard and in the hardware store and out in the lumberyard. I was born in 1943. So time I was at those playing ages, it was probably around 1950 or so. We lived right next to the railroad tracks that coming into Spokane. And this is still when they had those black engines, this steam engines. And I can remember they would stop off and outside right outside our home because there's a Hill coming up. And then when they would start up, you'd hear that steam blowing? Whatnot? And there was also on the box cars. There would be guys riding on them, sort of like hobos. That was really pretty common people. That's how the guys would travel. But I walked to school. It was about three blocks away. I loved school. To me, school was a lot of fun, and in those days, too, nobody worried about where you were. You go out at night, play in the street. In the area where I lived, there was a number of Japanese people and black people, and we all played together and nobody thought anything about it being unusual. It was just life. When I was about eleven years old, in late in the summer, the railroad company would come along and they'd burn all the grass alongside the tracks. Well, after they did that one time at night, the fire came up into the lumberyard and burned the lumberyard down. In fact, I've got a photograph of a turned up on the front page of the Spokesman Review. Well, we had a lot of smoke damage in the house. We ended up moving out to the Valley. So my junior high years and early high school years were spent out in the Spokane Valley in the Central Valley District. If I could carve three years out of my life, it would be 7th, 8th and 9th grade. Why I did what I did. I do not know, but I created grief for my poor dad because I was in trouble a lot at school. It seems like I was just there to mess up the works for four people. If I wrote a book, there'd be a whole chapter and all the stupid things I did on the 7th, 8th and 9th grade. You don't want to hear about it, really? You don't want to hear about it? I wanted to ask you, was this back when the streets in Spokane were brick? Yes. They were right in front of our place. They were brick. It's interesting now because where I live is right across the street from now is like a homeless shelter, a place where they give out thanks to them. So oftentimes when they show that noise, I say, I know that street. It's right up inside where we used to live. Yeah. Wow. The thing that kept me out of serious trouble in junior high and early high school was banned. I took up the drums, and that was my life. Percussion was my life for about 35 years. And I loved basketball. I wanted to be a professional basketball player when I grew up, and I worked really hard at it. I think, of course, it wasn't going to happen. It was one of those things. It didn't take long. By the time I was a junior in high school, I realized I was never going to be a professional basketball player. One of the big changes that occurred in my life for the good. Actually, it was when I was 16. We had a Lake place out at Twin Lakes, also where we would spend the summers. And dad started a small lumber yard. That's actually where my house is right now, here at Twin Lakes, right at the Channel. And dad wanted me to come up and work in the lumberyard when I was about 15 or so, and all I wanted to do is go play and water ski with my friends. Didn't want to do any of that kind of work. Then dad got sick. He went into the hospital in the fall of my junior year of high school, and he turns out he had cancer. They first gave him thought he might live for about two more years. And then they figured maybe about six months where he was gone at the end of the week. So it was very sudden. Well, I believe the Lord took him home for my sake, because it turned my life around seriously. I became responsible at school and did a lot better at school. And for several summers I ended up running that lumberyard out at Twin Lakes started when I was 16 years old at a lumber yard and hardware store. And mom says, You're too young. You can't go out and do that. I said goodbye. Mom and I went out there, and I learned how to do it. And then I stayed in the cabin that we had across the Lake. I batched it was I would say everything I learned about finances. I learned between the ages of 16 and 20, and the Lord put a number of people in my life to help, too. One of the things I learned about finances was never to be in debt. So the closest I've ever been into debt was when we built a home here. We borrowed some money, and I'll tell you about at some point who we borrowed it from, but I was able to get out of that in four years. Since that time, if I can't pay cash for something, I don't get it. Which has been really a blessing. Something that's very rare in our society today. Yes. After that is my College years. And that's then it starts becoming a whole new chapter of my life. But at this point in my life, I was not a Christian. Still, I had what I would call a God consciousness, but I wanted to do well. I wanted to do well in school and say, I did a lot of contest drumming competition. But I love playing and also played in a quartet dance band. In fact, I still tune for the pianist that we had in that group. We did a lot of high school dance jobs, junior Proms, senior balls. And we had just a lot of fun with that. A lot of jazz that we would do. Yeah. I wanted to ask you about the lumber yard. So your dad passes away, your father passes away and you're left with this lumber yard. And obviously, like you said, you weren't paying attention very much when he was alive. And so how was that transition in your life from going from playing and on the Lake and doing what you wanted to running the lumber yard? What were the challenges, the struggles, and what were some of the things that helped you along the way? Yes. Well, in those days, there was no such thing as Lows or Home Depot. You didn't go in and buy a two by four or one by twelve by the piece. You had to convert it to board feet so much per thousand. So there's a lot of math involved in that. A board foot is a board that's one inch thick, twelve inches wide and twelve inches long, so it would sell so much per board feet. And it was all done by the thousands so there's a lot of mathematics involved in that. And there was a piece of paper dad left in the desk that showed how to convert to board feet. That saved my life. Although one time I made a huge blunder, I sold a whole load of two by tens to a guy for one by tens because I forgot to double it for the two. And I was so embarrassed about it, I didn't go and tell him. So he got a deal of a lifetime. One good thing about it is the lumberyard was well stocked and the hardware store. And, of course, this is a small one at Twin Lakes. Mom leased out the one that was in Spokane. Okay, unfortunately, the guy couldn't pay the lease. So mom went to work in those days, if you were self employed, like my dad was, you didn't have to have Social Security, and he didn't have that. And I think it was the best thing for my mum because she went to work for, like, 20 years after that. Did that just give her a purpose in life? Is that why you say it was so important? I gave her something to do and look forward to. And she enjoyed the work that she did. We were living out in the Valley. She drove downtown and clerked in like, some of these older hotels where elderly people lived. And she just really enjoyed that. And eventually she moved into Spokane and worked at the Deaconess Hospital for quite a while. And then eventually she remarried one of her brother in law's. Her sister died, and she was married to him for 28 years. So she had 25 years with my dad and 28 years with somebody else and lived to be 97. Wow, that was that. But challenges in the lumber yard, golly, the Lord put so many people in my life that were helpful. One was an FBI agent lived right up the road from here, and I learned a really important lesson from him. And he became a lifelong friend as long as he was alive. John Balker, he looked like an FBI agent, just tough looking guy. In fact, one time he ended up catching a bank robber on the streets of Spokane. He said the most difficult situation they would go into would be like if they were going into a cabin on Cordoline Lake, something like that. And some guy has holed up in the cabin. And you don't know if you're going to open a closet door and get blown away or what I said. Those are the most dangerous things. But he had a cabin up the road for me, and he would come down and help me at the cabin. In fact, we used to go to auctions together, and we would get materials for the blue yard. He would bid on him. But he kind of helped me kind of organize, just organize things in the yard. But also since I was going to be starting College. I had to be careful that I didn't have too much inventory at the end of the year. Things tied up because I needed enough money to go to College. But actually, after the first year and a half, I spent eleven years in College. The rest of it didn't cost me anything. Scholarships and fellowships. I learned the importance of getting good grades. But the lesson I learned from John was he said he ordered a load of lumber and supplies, and he says, when can we meet? I said, I'll meet you 01:00 on whatever day it was, I dilly Dally around and didn't get there at one time. I got there 130. There was a note on his door and he says, Mike, he'd be here at 100, so I'm canceling the order. I was mortified by that, and he told me later on, he says, in what I do, I have to do a lot of interviews with people on investigations. It's important that when you say you're going to be there at that time, you be there at that time. I haven't always done that, but I've always tried to do that to be on time. I learned that, by the way, he eventually reordered the order. That one stuck with me. In fact, it stuck with me so well, what I do is I think probably from the time I was about 18, I've always kept my clocks 15 minutes ahead, so I won't be late. You probably know what the problem with that is. Pretty soon you start interpretating. I look at I said, Well, it's really this amount of time, but still try to do that. I'm remembering that now I had forgotten about how you kept your watches set like that. Do you think that all of the people in your life that helped you along the way is that what sort of motivated you gave you the desire to help young people in the future when you had the land and you had young people coming and working with you and teaching them how to work? I think some of it goes clear back. My dad was 50 when I was born. So here I am, ten years old. My dad is 60 years old. We never did anything together, like play, grown out and play. And I said, you know something when I get married, we're going to have our children because I want to grow up and I want to play with the kids and do stuff with them. And it did. We had a good time growing up together and when they got older and then I started missing that. That's when I started having other boys come and I said, Well, why not just keep riding and go? I'll just borrow somebody else's kids and be there kind of a way, not their dad, obviously, but just kind of continue what I was doing with my own kids and then I think probably. I say, in 1965, when I became a Christian, I was always working with kids at school in school. And I just really enjoyed that. I thought, Man, I love doing this the rest of my life. Yeah. Probably. At some point I realized that there was an opportunity to have a Godly influence on them. And for me, that was really important. But I also had to see that I was fallible make mistakes and follow things up, too, trying to think of that thing with the lumberyard. I did it for several years, and then finally I sold the buildings off of it. And it was an empty lot until we built our home here. There was all the intervening things where I ended up living with the people we bought the Timberland from. That's a whole nother chapter of life. Yeah. Well, I want to talk a little bit about your College years, but before we do, I have one last question. And this is sort of a random question, but it has to do with the history of this place. A lot of people may not know. There used to be some train tracks that came right out to the end of Twin Lakes. Yes. In fact, you drive across them when you go to your home. It came down off of Mount Scokan, and it went out to Seasons Road, right where there used to be an overpass a bridge, which they've taken out since that time. Yes. Wow. There were tracks there. And when I was a little boy and we bought this cabin across the backside of Twin Lakes, I was probably about six or seven years old. I remember coming down here and there was a big sawmill right where my home is right now. And it was loud. And for a little kid, it scared me. And I can remember along the road out here, it was giant pile of slabs. But down towards the Lake was the mill part of Beard Nandorphin. And at that time, there were still boats on the Lake. Like, what do you call them? Tugs that would bring log booms down the Lake. And then, of course, that eventually was all torn down and gone. A lot of history in the area around logging. Yeah. I always found that very fascinating. And I know there are so many people who have no idea that there was a train that ran through here. And that was specifically for the logging. Yes. A similar thing at Spirit Lake. There they had a log Flume that came down, and there's still remnants of that there. And there was a very large sawmill down at the foot of the Lake below Spirit Lake town. Okay. And got taken out by a fire in the 1930s. Really? Okay. Let's transition into your College days. You were in College for quite a few years. You got many degrees. We were just talking about this before we started the podcast yes, I have one deep regret from high school, and it's that I never took typing. I don't know how I got out of high school without typing typing. But I two finger Typed my way through College, and it's probably why I don't text much now because it's too slow. So used to using a phone in the foyer of the dorm that I lived in. Dorms were in ways that could be two dorms connected together up on the wall that had a list of all the kids who are on the honor roll and what their GPA was. I looked at that. I said, I want to be on that. That kind of motivated me to do really well, back then, it cost about $600 a semester for room and board and everything. Oh, my gosh. And I had two scholarships out of high school for about $100 and 100 and a quarter. But that didn't leave a whole lot. And so the lumberyard money paid for the rest of it. Well, let's see. I told you I went as a percussionist and drummer, and it turned out there was no percussion instructor. So I wanted to be a band director. And so I knew I was having to take music theory, and I knew that from the summer before. And so my drum instructor gave me a music theory book, and I kind of studied that as I went through, but also because I was percussion. I understood the keyboard layout because I played the vibes, and I played a marimba. I could do that. But I did not play the piano. I think when I was a kid, I took piano lessons for a very short time, but I found out there was no percussion instructor. I thought one of the main reasons I came here was to take percussion. Plus, I found the other drummers in the band weren't so interested in doing all the things I wanted to do and then work up some special things to do with the percussion. So I decided to take panelists. Well, you had to go in and do an audition to find out where they were going to place you. Well, I knew where I was going to get placed at the beginning, whatever the lowest number, 100 would be. So what I did is I worked. I just heard it today because I fixed the piano for the girl. She played the beginning of the Moonlight Sonata, Beethoven song. It's really quite easy, and I kind of toughed it out one page, first page. So I went in. I sat down there's five professors in there, and I'm totally unintimidated at all by this. At this point, I didn't know enough to be afraid. I sat down and I played it and the main piano process. Well, how did you do that? Take lesson. I said, no, I thought, and they kind of laughed about it. And they said, okay, who wants him? Dead silent. Nobody said that after about 15 20 seconds, Dr. Stout said, I'll take him. There's another major change in my life. Dr. Stout was the chairman of the music Department. He was also a piano tuner, so I think you can see what's coming there. And he was the perfect person for me. I just love practicing. It was usually 5 hours a day. I didn't have a girlfriend, so there was no distractions in the evening, and studies went pretty easily for me. So I spent hours and hours practicing the piano. There was a place called Agony Hall. There was an old wood structure where all the practice rooms were. It was agony, because if you're walking by from outside, you can hear all of the confusion from all the instruments being played. But he had a really neat player grand piano in there, and I got to practice on that. And then I would play the roles on that player. Piano was a very sophisticated kind of a player. I got one years later on in life. But that was the beginning of a really long relationship. About the middle of my second year, they asked me to come and live with them. They had another boy. They always had somebody living with them at their home. This boy was from Japan, the other boy at that time, but he also started to build a new home. Well, remember how I told you I either buy wholesale or buy retail in those days? In fact, when I had the lumberyard, one of the reasons I dealt with cash is I really didn't understand checks, but I figured I could not go into a wholesale house in Spokane as a 16 year old kid and that they're going to sell me something on credit or something. So I always dealt with cash. Okay, but I was able to help them get a lot of materials for their home wholesale because I had the lovely yard. So I was able to help them on building that. Eventually Dr. Stout taught me to two pianos, and that became another whole part of my life. The first five years were spent at WSU. It didn't take me very long to realize it was not going to be a band director. But I love music theory. So I ended up majoring in music theory. I went on for a fifth year. I got a Bachelor of arts in music, and then I got a Bachelor of music. The fifth year was mostly there were a number of us students who would get together four or five of us and get a piano or get a Prof to work with us on a special project. We did that the whole year, and then we would present these projects to each other. And I applied to graduate school, and I think I applied to three graduate schools, University, Washington, Ohio State University, and a conservatory back on the East Coast. They offered me a teaching assistant ship at Ohio State. And just before I said yes to take it in came an offer from the University of Washington for a Fellowship. Well, the difference is in the teaching assistantship you're required to teach, you get paid a little bit enough, usually to cover your schooling or at least a good part of it. A Fellowship is just an outright grant to you. So in those years, it was $1,800 the first year, 2000, the second 2300, the third year that paid for everything you needed our rent, which was $75 a month. And so I grabbed that. We went to Seattle. And there's a whole other aspect to this, too. And that's marriage, because I was going to ask you that. So anyway, there was five years at WCU, then there was three years at the University of Washington, and he did a lot of performing, most of them Besides working on a degree. And I was on a program that bypassed the master's. He went straight to a PhD. I had troubles with the fellow that I worked with on my dissertation. I made a blunder. I thought that the fifth year I had at WSU that I knew about writing. And this fellow who oversaw my dissertation was the person who taught the writing class. And he just gave me all kinds of grief. And so I ended up working with another fellow who worked very well. So I went back to WSU. Now they had a percussion instructor, me and music theory and history. And so I stayed there another three years. But then there's a lot of politics in College teaching. I'm not sure I want to spend my life doing this. Plus, I like north eyed a whole lot more. So I got an elementary degree, worked on elementary. So I was teaching in the music Department. I was teaching percussion lessons, ensemble. And then I had a music theory class and music history class until I left. And we moved up here. And we rented for a number of years before we built the house here. Where were you renting from? Out of curiosity, there were some folks at the east end of Spirit Lake that we knew they had a daylight basement. And they were the postmaster and postmistress of Spirit Lake. We got to know them through the Church that we were going to in Spirit Lake. And they said, we'll rent your basement for the winter. We don't use it. And it was perfect because we had to leave the mountain, usually at the end of October, when the water froze. And then we would move down there and we'd move back up to the cabin. We did that for a number of years. And then one year we rented somebody's home on the highway side of Spirit Lake. Then we built our home. Okay. Did you meet your wife before or after you started working up on the mountain for the gentleman up there? Yes. Before our life could be a soap opera. I teach you now on one of those band tours that we took when I was in high school. We went to Eisenhower High School in Yakama. And I was the President of the band. I got to stay with the President of the band there. Jim scored all, and he became a good friend because he came to WSU the year that I started WSU a lot of really fine musicians from all over Washington, Cayman. So it was a great experience with these people. So we played this concert in the afternoon. We're going to do another concert at night. And Jim said, there's this flute player in our band. She would really like to meet you. That night. We went out to ice cream joint in Maryland. I was smitten the moment I saw her. Of course. What do you call that? She was very attractive. Very attractive. Yeah. So she was only a sophomore. So I waited for her when I went to College for two years. That was why I could practice piano 5 hours a day, distractions a day. We were going to get married. And her dad owned a music store in Yakima. They eventually moved to Edmunds, Washington. In fact, these folks said, if you want your Lope, we'll give you $500. But if you wait until you graduate, we'll give you a wedding. Well, so we really kind of tied it on that when she showed up. But I wasn't in the band any longer because the credits were so little for the amount of time I needed to put more into academic subjects. In the spring, she came home from band tour in the arm of another guy. I was crushed. Here I am with this melancholy temperament, and I would have to say it was a dark period of my life. I came to hair's breath from suicide to kill you. I went up on the mountain. I was going to end it. That closer. And I kid you not. I'm glad I didn't. There's me a whole bunch of grandchildren, children that would be unhappy if that had happened. But what stopped you? I wasn't a Christian yet, but I believe the Lord greases us out in areas. However he reached me. I don't know, but I didn't. And I know it will never happen again because I've learned too much. I have known a number of people that have taken their lives. I thought they have no idea what they missed, but it was there then. So I do understand how that can happen, but a lot of it is that melancholy temperament that's prone to up and down the roller coaster. I believe it was probably the beginning of the next year. We had what it was called convocations, where if you were taking lessons, you played at least once a semester or twice a semester. And it was a regular class, and everybody goes to it's like an hour concert every week you got to hear other kids play. This girl came out with long Brown hair and played a bronze in her bed. So that was it. And she was a friend of my roommate at that time. Remember I told you, Stouts always had somebody else living with them. And this boy came from Cuba, and his folks owned a hardware store in Cuba. And when Castro came in, everybody thought he was going to free the country. And that's not what happened in the other direction. And he ended up escaping out of that country, went into Mexico, came up, spoke very little English, but he was a very fine pianist. That's how he ended up at the Stouts also. But Larry Martinez, there was a group of these kids that ran together, and Anne was one of them. And he kind of made the introduction for me. Anne and I spent quite a bit of time together the next year. I think it was probably the next year would have been my fifth year. I realized we were having difficulties. I thought, this is not really working very well. So she lived in Seattle, was going to come over for a wedding. And I was going to go to this wedding with her, a friend of hers, which we did. And I was going to tell her at that time. I think maybe it would be best if we terminated the relationship. What happened next is improbable. After the wedding, I said, do you want to go get married? She said, yes. We drove over to Court a Lane. I went to a drugstore about a three dollar diamond ring. We went to the hitching post and got married. And she left and went back to Seattle. And I think it was about two weeks before school. And I went back to school. We never told anybody. I think I know somebody else who did something like that. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know who you're talking about. Okay. Good. Anyway. So our first year of marriage aunt still lived in the dorm with a good friend of hers. And at this point now I was in an apartment with two good friends. That was the first year. And at one point I told her, we need to tell your folks what we've done and get living together. Her dad worked for Boeing in Seattle, but he got transferred down to Louisiana. This was during the time when the SST supersonic transport kind of crashed and burned for Boeing. Anyway, they moved him down there, but he was going to end up coming back up to Seattle. And she said, let's wait until this next summer and then we'll get married in a Church. Neither one of us are Christians, but we're going to get married in a Church. Okay. And that's what happened. And that's when I was at the University of Washington as a grad student. So I can't remember what your question was. But that's how Anne came into my life. She was a teacher, and I was a teacher. We were both teachers. She's a very fine pianist and flute player. She taught all our kids piano lessons and flute lessons. I did tell one person that first year it was my piano teacher. And by this time I was working with a different piano teacher, the main piano teacher rather than Dr. Scout. And it was years later before I started telling everyone our kids and whatnot? Because by this time, who cares? But it was like starting a race and falling down in the first 3ft. It was not the way to start out a marriage problematic, but we were together for 29 years and then struck out our own. That was 28 years ago. So I've lived alone for 28 years. I think of Anne's having gone on a long vacation, but she did remarry a few years ago, and there's half of the year in New Zealand. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. And then half of the year in Seattle. Yeah. I always wanted a good marriage. From the time I was 15 years old, I was ready to get married. And somehow the one thing I think we were able to do well was raise our children. They all turned out well, very, very thankful for that. But somehow the good marriage escaped us. And when you talk about that's, the major failure in my life, major failure. What I have learned is how to be content. I know all the verses on contentment. It also helps to have a couple of good dogs. So it goes, I want to talk to you about the mountain, because that is a part of your life that I have experienced a very small part of your life on the mountain. Well, it would start with when dad was in the hospital dying. I'm sure he had no idea that I was going to end up going out and running out a lumberyard because I had no interest in it, seemingly no interest. But he did say there's a fellow who has bought a load of materials, but he lives down in California during the winter. He was a Mailman in Beverly Hills, of all things to all of the stars and whatnot? And he said, Somebody's going to have to deliver that load in the lumberyard. I had a pickup truck, a 49 International pickup truck. It was an old Bell telephone truck. It's the first vehicle I drove off to College in. And we had a big flat bed truck. Big flatbed for hauling big, heavy loads of stuff. Sure enough, the next spring, Cecil Brisco shows up an elderly fellow and he wanted his materials delivered. He said, how much are you going to charge me? And I said, Well, how far away is it? He says, about 5 miles. I said nothing. I'll deliver it for free. He didn't tell me it was going to be up this mountain through a saddle and down into Spirit Lake. But that was the beginning of a very long relationship. He bought a lot of stuff from he was remodeling his home, his house. He and his wife lived there. They had six children, but they were all grown and living in various parts of the country and the world. The cabin that we had across the Lake that I lived in, it started having some problems with the leaky roof, and mom didn't want to deal with it, so she sold the cabin. So now I don't have anywhere to live. So Brisco said, Would you like to come and live with us at the cabin and you could work for room and board? And I said, sure. So he required 3 hours a day. He says that's what it is in California. He always compared everything to what it was in La. It was interesting going to the store with him. He also was hard of hearing, so he talked really loudly. Everybody within 50ft could hear it. And he'd say, Well, I can get it for this much in California, meaning much less. But they were really good to be in. And I ended up doing a lot of remodeling work in there. In fact, there's a whole story about horse logging that I did, which is a fascinating story that goes with the Timberland. But I had all this timber that I logged with a big workhorse into Cedar paneling, ended up paneling his hole inside of his house ceilings and whatnot this place had been abandoned somewhere in the homesteaded in the 30s. So when they bought it about 1949, it had been vandalized and all the walls were covered, like with wallpaper, and it was all cracking. I was really interested in putting the ceiling up because pack rat droppings would kind of filter down on to you. But it was a good time. And he said he would pay me for anything I did over 3 hours a day. So I got this little book and I kept tracking oftentimes. It was 10 hours a day, and they had a piano in there, too, so I could practice the piano and then work. You just throw something out, like horse logging, and then we just leave it. And I have got to ask you about the horse logging. Did you have any idea what you were doing when you went in to did I have any idea where you're doing? Well, you know where Twin Lakes Village is? Well, back then it was the Percy Cochrane Ranch. Percy Cochran is another interesting kind of an old timer fellow. When you go down into his Ranch there, he had some huge ponderosas, really neat. Most of them were taken out when they put the golf course in down there and whatnot? But he had names. I've always wanted to do this, but he had names on the trees for his friends. He named the trees after his friends. But I noticed there were these great big horses out in the field. And I thought, you know, again, you buy wholesale and you sell at retail. And I bought all my lumber from sawmills. And I thought, what if I got that horse and Brisco let me cut some timber off his land and could log it out? And I could sold out. And I could cut out the middleman and do really well. Well, my friend John Bauker, the FBI agent. He loaned me a chainsaw, and I had a friend, Dave Larson. He was my good friend from high school. We went in there and told the guy who owned the horse was actually a guy who worked for Percy Cochran that owned him. And he told me we would like to do some horse logging on this land at Spirit Lake. And is there any chance we could rent one of your workhorses? Who in his right mind is going to let a couple of kids take their workhorse several miles up the road and over the mountain? Well, he said yes, apparently, that guy. Yeah, he did. He said, you know how to put the harness on. Oh, yeah, we do. I had no clue as to how to put a harness on, but he dumped this whole load of leather stuff on the back of the flatbed truck. And Dave got on the back of the horse, which is really wide. We rode that thing almost 5 miles from a house here another two or 3 miles, 8 miles. He rode that horse up and over the mountain. Well, I'd already had cut the logs. The logs are ready. They just needed to be skitted. The horse's name was Blue. So we put the harness on, figured out how to get that on. And then there's a piece of wood called a single tree that goes behind the horse. And then your cable behind that. It keeps the rains, all the stuff away from the horse getting tangled up in a single tree. One went backed up the Hill with the horse, hooked him up to the lawn. Get up, Blue. And he pulled these big logs like they were nothing just right down the Hill. Well, it wasn't a straight trail. It kind of turned. And when it turned, I tried to slow him down because there was a stump in front of us. He didn't slow down. He just kept going. The log went into the stump and snapped that single tree in half. I thought, Why didn't he stop? I don't know. But we went down to Briscos, and he had a shed that was unbelievable. Whatever you needed. He had in that shed, and he had a couple of single trees hanging up on the wall. And so he gave us both single trees. We took back, hooked him back up, hooked the horse back up, got the log down, went up to get the second log down on the way down. Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. He didn't woe again and snapped the sink and single tree. Now we're in trouble. So we looked it over. Somehow we're doing something wrong. What we did not have to do. The rains that I held on were not hooked up to the bit in his mouth. So once we did, that solved the problem, and we ended up skidding the rest of those logs out. What never occurred to me to do was to hire a self Loading truck to come up and get those logs. We figured out, Jimmy, the way to get those logs up on that flatbed truck by going to where a switchback is in the road. And so we put the logs on the upper side, put the truck on, and rolled them onto the truck, and then up near the property line. Those we loaded on the truck by putting a cable across the road and pulling system on, lifted up one end and pushed it up on the truck. But we got several thousand feet of Cedar up here on the road. There used to be a sawmill in there and took them all up. They ran out all into Cedar lumber. I took it into Spokane to a planer and had it all planned into paneling. So there was enough to do Briscos, which he bought the Cedar from me. There was enough to do the whole basement of Doctor Stout's home and their new home to finish that off. Plus, they had some more left over that ended up selling to a builder in Pullman. So it ended up working out. But I went to my friend John Bawker, the FBI agent. I said, Why didn't you tell me what I was in for? Because, frankly, I lost my shirt on hold. And he says you needed to know that one by experience. I knew that you weren't going to come out on it. So you find out why they're a middleman. But that was a wise man. It was experience wise man. Yeah. Wow. That is quite an experience, huh? So you're working for Brisco? Yes. And is he paying you along the way? He said he would pay you. He said he would pay me. Yes. Well, he never brought it up again. He had another son, Laurel, who lived down in Texas, and he taught at the University of Texas in Austin. He wrote textbooks, Spanish textbooks for high school, so he would come up in the summer and he'd be editing and working on his books. And I ran by him once. I said your dad said he would pay me for the work I did over 3 hours a day, but he's never brought it up again. I'm thinking he was always talking about finances, too, and I thought probably he maybe didn't have it to do it. He says, All dad does, that's not a problem. You can bring it up to him. But there was a really another neat thing about Laurel. The dad would always tell me what a great pianist this kid as a kid. And I thought it was just the dad bragging him up until I heard him play. He was a phenomenal pianist. In fact, he was the pianist at the Church of the Open Door in Los Angeles, where J. Vernon McGee preached, who had a radio program for years, called through the Bible. But he was not just a wonderful pianist, but he was largely responsible for my becoming a Christian. Because I watched his life. He had a wife kind of impact him. I thought, how does he do that? How does he do that? He's just calm about the whole thing. But it was interesting to talk to him. We ended up playing piano, duet, some divorceok salvonic dances. And I've got some photographs of Laura. I'd always hoped that some of the land he would end up with it. But one sun froze everybody else out. What was the question? That's okay. Well, I was just wondering, you were working for Britain. He wasn't paying you, and he never brought it back up again? No. So I didn't worry about it because again, by the middle of my second year of College, it wasn't costing me anything more. Remember I told you about that board up on the wall in the dorm that had everybody on the roll and you wanted to be on? Yes, and I did. But when I found something else out, when you get good grades, you can get scholarships. They'll pay you to go to school. And then by the fifth year, I was at Ta. So I was getting paid for teaching. While I was going to school. I had the fellowship and graduate school. So that paid for everything. I went back to WSU now is teaching and working on that elementary degree. So it wasn't costing me anything going to school. So I enjoyed the summer to me. And I was running the lumberyard on just on weekends now Saturday. So you weren't really thinking about the money at the time? Not so much. No. And it was okay. We were out in a shed one day, and Cecil said, he says, I think if the paper company, who owned a lot of land around us in an Empire, paper company will put a good road down into here, I'll sell them those three upper 80s. There were three Eighties, and in between it was stuck. At that time, it was Bureau of Land Management ended up becoming paper company 80. And just out of the blue, I said, Cecil, would you sell them to me? No. I had no idea how many I would ever pay for something. But I was interested in the land. So he said, Well, I'll ask my wife. So he asked his wife, and he said, what we want to do is ask our children six children. So they did. Three of them said yes. Three of them said no. So he says, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll sell you 180 acres, and it was the one furthest away. It also was the one that had the most timber on it. Is that the one that the cabin is on now? Yes. Okay. But even after I bought it, I had no idea where the property lines were. And it was a while before I got it surveyed. Why I needed to do that. All I knew is I had 80 acres. Well, now comes the idea. How much do you pay for it? How much is it going to cost? He went to a realtor and the realtor said, Is there water on the property? She still said yes. There were. There are several creeks on that part of it. The price immediately doubled to $45 an acre. $45 an acre. Oh, my goodness. Wow. For 80 acres. Okay. So I'm at school. I'm paying for school. But I'm also tuning pianos now. My wife was also teaching. She was a second grade teacher in Seattle. And I said, Cecil, if I could pay that off in five years, would you sell it to us without interest? He said yes. So there was the motivation. So there went piano tuning money and whatnot? And we did get it paid off in five years. So you paid the $3,600 in five years? Yeah. Okay. We're able to do that. And of course, once it got the property, then it was off to the races to get a road in up to there the fact. Well, the first few years we just lived in the clearing, lived in a tent. That's a whole nother chapter of life. Living in a tent during the summer, probably must have been. We bought at 65, 66 67. It was a very dry summer. It was the year of the big fires up at Priest Lake. I think the Trapper Peak and Sundance fires. They were huge thousands of acres. The smoke came down and it was a smoky summer. But in those days were also no dumpsters to go to or your garbage. So we just put it in paper bags behind the tent. We were living in a tent at that time. That was it. And a pickup truck. And the way we made some money, as I made some of the posts, made some of the Cedar into post, and we sold them over to North Idaho Post about $15 a week. We made doing that well, on the 4 July, when across the Lake, my sister had a cabin over there. We came back and the place was absolutely trashed. Bears had come in. We just ripped the tent to shreds somehow, and it just made some raspberry jam, and it was all broken up. There were quite a few more bears on the mountains. Oh, yes, there is. The whole chapter of my life would be all my bear experiences. That was the first one. Well, I told Cecil about it, went down and kind of stayed at the cabinet because we had no tent to stay in now. And my wife, I think it might have been Kristen may have just been born sort of in 1968. Then she went over and lived with my sister across the Lake while I worked. So Cecil, he said, Well, let's go up the next evening and see if the bear show up again and maybe we can deal with them. So we're getting close to the clearing, coming around. And here are three bears around in the clearing. We are told the Cecil is hard to hearing. There they are shouts and the bears. They were gone. So that was that summer. The next summer I got a tent and we lived further up in a clearing again. So there was two years and ten. And then I lived in the back of the truck. I think at the time when Kristen was a baby, they kind of confused some things there. But then I got the land surveyed and found out when I found out that where we ended up building houses, there was a little bit of land that was kind of flattened. Those big trees that was a road cut into their headache cleared. And from then on it was all the work of building the cabin, putting in a garden, putting in the yards. And it took years just to get rid of the stumps. It was a lot of work, a lot of work. Well, it was summers. That was the next several summers, by the way, a couple of years later, Cecil said, Would you like that now? It was 100 acres because he had changed some things down at the bottom of the land, basically the Canyon. Would you like that? And I said, how much? He said, $300 an acre? I said, no. First of all, I didn't have $300 an acre. Plus there was nothing on it to speak of. However, I will have to say that over the years, the whole forest grew up and it's been clear cut here two winners ago. That was it. A couple of years later. I think we're talking 1974 now he says, I'd like to see how that 80 right next to you, the one that connects with you. I didn't care how much he was going to ask for. I was going to take it. And I said, how much is $200? We'll take it. So I had to negotiate again, how to do this. By this time, they weren't going to want to come up in the summer any longer. They're getting pretty old, but they wanted the place kind of looked after, kept up. And I said, See, so if I make it look like there's somebody all the time, the boys now go down. We'll keep the lawn mowed. We'll keep it looking like somebody's there all the time. Would you sell it to me without interest. He said yes. It took several years because the 200 now is $16,000. So CESEL never paid me for those hours. I worked after 3 hours a day. But I have to tell you, we got paid very, very well. My guess is over the years we've taken off probably 2 millionft of timber off that land. Wow. And it's still fully stocked, growing very well. I would say probably the boys that work for me make more money than I do because there are so many costs that go with logging. They're unbelievable. So 240 acres is what you have. 160. I'm sorry. 160. Yeah. You actually end up with more because they survey it as if it were flat. And here it is all in the mountains. It's also on a section line, which gives you a few more because of the curvature of the Earth. But whatever it is, it's a lot. Well, the cabin is just beautiful and you actually have multiple cabins. You have the small cabin, you have a little cabin that has, like, a single room cabin, and then you have the big cabin. What was the situation there? Which one did you build? 1st 1st name I built was an outhouse and it was down by the clearing. And then when the road got built up into where the property was, the first thing we built was that cabin. It's 16 X 24. It's got a porch. So the main room is 16 X 16. We had one child, Kristen, her daughter in those years. And I split all the shakes myself, which I have for all of the buildings out of long. But the loggers left over the years also peeled the bark off of them, so it's all covered with Cedar bark. It's big, thick. These Cedar trees were hundreds of years old, but it was the only lumber that I ever went and bought from a mail. All the later buildings were built out of logs that were logged off the property and took it and had cut out and planned. So that first cabin did us. And then the boys all came along. Three boys two years apart. Christian was born in 68, the boys 72, 74, and 76. So the cabin obviously was not going to be sufficient. So I built a second smaller cabin, another small cabin, and three of the kids stayed down there. And in that cabin there was a loft upstairs and two of them could be downstairs about I decided to build a big home, bigger home. It never occurred to me to go get a generator. It was all built with hand tools. Yes, it's a big cabin, big cabin. It's got a daylight basement, two stories and an attic up on top. It took me five years to split all the shakes for it that are on it. It was a major production, but those are also the years that I was in a Christian school. Now I didn't have time to work on it. So it kind of sat there unfinished for several years. So you're teaching at a Christian school? I was then in the raft room. Yeah. Something that you taught us over the years that I just have to bring up when you're talking about the cabin is taking care of the things that you have. Yes. It was a load of fun putting everything in. But eventually, it's almost as those things possess you. We got a huge garden, a couple of yards of lawns and about 20 fruit trees. They grow very well up there. Yeah. And you spend so much time on maintenance. And now, at my age, 77, almost 78, it's overwhelming trying to take care of two places. So a lot of things are starting to deteriorate. The boys all have jobs that are full time, so they can't do like I did take the summer off because I was teaching or I just stopped tuning pianos now, and I take the summer and work up there. And so things like the fences that need replacing or deteriorating other things. I don't know what happens when I'm off to the scene. What's going to happen to the place? I love gardening. It's a huge garden, and the fruit trees are a lot of fun. And of course, it's far more than I need. So I take things with me in the fall, and I give it to people I tune for and three boys and their families. So it all gets used. It all gets dealt with. Yeah. So for people who have not been paying too much of attention, you're a piano tuner. You tune pianos in the wintertime during the school year during the school year, and then you work on the mountain in the summer. Right. And so how many pianos do you typically tune every year? Well, yeah. That's another thing is I haven't figured out how to cut back the ease back, and I'm going to have to now I'm going to have to do it somehow. But I cover a huge area. I still go down to the police country two days a week, usually Tuesdays and Wednesday. I stay in a retirement home in Colfax on Tuesday nights. I do about 200 pianos somewhere down into Pullman, Moscow, Colfax out on the farms areas. And then I go as far north as I own Medley Falls in Washington and homeless to the Canadian border and a boners ferry in Idaho. They're sort of like highway quarters. I follow, and I do about 600 during the school year. And there was a time until I taught one of my sons 27 years ago to tune. Even there was a time I was doing about 900 a year when PJ started tuning. I gave him a lot of the work and the only tuning he does now because he's a full time RN at the hospital and Post Falls, where he works in the operating room. They just do surgeries all day, and he works on it. But he did keep the College in Coeur Dlane, and I tuned to Nic North Idaho College for about 20 years and then gave that to PJ. So everything is kind of overwhelming now, especially with the numbers of surgeries I've had to fix things. I'm always trying to catch up then on the tuning, but I usually do four or five a day. That's a large number of pianos. And you're one of the few people left in this area that tuned by ear. Is that correct? Well, I tried tuning by ear, but it hurt so much. I went back to using my hands. I know all the piano tuning jokes. Yes, there aren't very many, and I think there's a reason for it one it takes a long time to build up a clientele. I'd say 99% of my work is word of mouth, but it's a very solitary profession and acquires an intense concentration. But it's not what I call high stress compared to teaching. When I was teaching in the Christian school. Often I'd go out just to relax, and I'd tune a piano or two in the evening. Many of the pianos I've done for many years. I can think of one Lady I tuned for recently. She was in high school when I first started tuning for him in Pullman. She has a home in Pullman and one at Priest Lake, and I've tuned her piano for 56 years. As long as I've been tuning in. And there are some other places where I've done tuned that long. There's a lot of clients that you have that where are they going to go when you start tuning? Yes, that's what they always say. I hope I die before three people retire, my doctor, my dentist and my mechanic. Unfortunately, they've all pretty much retired and trying to find someone else is not easy. People tell me the same thing. What are we going to do when you're not here? Because people who live in town, they'll be able to get another tuner. But so much of my work is far away, because when I taught PJ my son, I gave him all the close end work because he has a family. I lived alone, so I did all the far away work. So I drive probably a minimum 500 miles a week, 300 miles on Tuesday and Wednesday alone, depending on how much east and west, the kind of highway corridors you follow. 195 from Spokane, down through the police country highway 95 from Moscow to Bonners Ferry. And I send out letters twice a year with a self address stamp cards and about 600 letters at a time. When those cards come back, I put them in order by the different areas that I go in the order of when they get tuned. So I tried to come out the same time each year. So I set up all my work a week at a time, because once the week starts, I just about living in my car. You mentioned your surgeries, and I wanted to say that you are quite fit for your age and that has come from a couple of different things. I think that's come from your drive. You're a very hard worker and you're always working and you're always moving. And that has been very helpful in your life. But you were also a marathon runner. Yeah. Talk about tell me why. First of all, what got you into running? And it became an obsession of yours that you almost first of all, say something about the work ethic. If your parents went through the Depression, I can almost guarantee that you grew up with a work ethic because in those days there weren't all of the social safety nets that there are now and people who struggle to get through that. They pass that ethic on to their children. At least that's kind of how I see it. That's how I got that. When I taught school, we had PE and there was a playfield that we went to this when I was in the Christian school that we would go to about a half mile away. And I could tell you getting over there, I'd have to stop about three times and walk and breathe. My weight was up to about £210. I had to wedge myself between the bed and the wall to get my socks on. It wasn't good because I'm in my 40s now, but I realized if I don't get myself into shape pretty soon, it's not going to happen. Well, Anne signed us up for a five K in Rathdrum. I thought this is going to be embarrassing, so I started. I think I better get into shape ahead of a month or so. I started running around the garden every day. I'd run about ten minutes. It was agony for the first couple of weeks, just absolute agony and I changed my diet. I said, I'm going to try to lose some weight. Believe it or not, I lost a pound a day until I lost £60. That summer. I was down to 150 by the end of summer, so I ran the first five K ever ran and running that kind of hooked me on to run. I thought, I can do better. I can improve. The whole idea was I can improve. So did a couple more five KS that summer. It was a good way to go visit towns that it would have their Salvation and they would have a run. Plus they gave away. In those days they gave away some really neat prizes after the race. I never got him. But I got remember a guy at Raltram. He got the bike, he won a bike. And I saw him up at Kellogg and he got the main Prizer, which was some silver medallions or something from Sunshine Mine. I got a two, four on that. But it was fun and the whole family we would go to these things because then they usually had some kind of a flea market afterwards of people that had goods that they sold. And after I did that for a couple of years, I got to thinking, I wonder if I could run a marathon. I could run that far. So I started kind of working up to it, joined the north end of the road runners and got some good counsel, made some friends there. And I finally signed up for the Coraline Marathon for the next year. It was probably about probably about 47, 48 years ago when I ran it. When I ran out first, I remembered down by Sanders Beach. It's in the last mile or two. Going over the speed bumps was like crawling over a wall. It was just dead shot. But I was hooked. That was the beginning. And I had ten really good years in my 50s and actually into my 60s before some difficulties started to show up. But it was always could I get faster? Could I improve? And it also became an excuse to go visit places. So I would start going down to Portland in October, early October, in Seattle, around Thanksgiving. Loved going up in May to Vancouver, British Columbia, ended up doing about six a year pretty quickly. And then I was getting down to pretty close to three and a half hours, and I thought it's an eight minute mile. I thought if I could do that, that would be a good lifetime goal. Then I found out that was the qualifying time for Boston. Now I'm really motivated. Well, in July, there was a five mile that would do up at Priest River at the end of July. And afterwards I felt I said something's gone wrong down in my abdominal area. I think I've done something, but I want to find out I had a hernia. So the surgeon said if I do that surgery now, you'll never run in October in Portland to try to qualify for Boston. But you can run with that thing the way it is now and see if you could qualify. So I remember I did a lot of my training on the track Lakeland track as I could run at night, keep track of miles easy and had my water right there. I stopped running on the county roads because they're crowned and it was starting to cause trouble for my knees. But when I ran and ran on the track and it's rubberized, the knee problems went away. Okay, well, the problem is sometimes the hernia that your innards would pooch out. I'd have to lie down on the track and push them back in. Unfortunately, I didn't qualify that year anyway, so the runs are all almost always. On Sunday. On Monday, I went in to have the hernia surgery. The guy says I'll see me in a week. When I went up to the cabin, and I don't know whether it was probably from the running the day before everything swelled up. That thing swelled up to the size of a grapefruit. I could barely move, and I didn't turn black and blue on that right side. When I went back in there a week later, he said, Man looks, I did that surgery with a ball peen hammer, but anyway, about a year or so later, I did qualify. Okay. I was fortunate enough to be able to go back there four times to Boston. And what an experience I would take a week afterwards and travel through New England to stay an old bed and breakfast and go to old museums and got to go to the Boston Symphony once. But they were really good years. My older sister, Pat, went with me to a lot of runs, but by the end, the last one I did was when I was 71, and I didn't realize at that time, but also started doing a lot of half marathons is that I had, like, a low blood sugar was causing me grief. And once I figured out how to deal with that, it kept going. But I ran my last marathon when I was 71. Now it's probably mainly just because I got too many other things to do, but the running is pretty much over. Do you remember off the top of your head your fastest marathon time? Yeah, it's right there on the wall. It's the only one that had the finish time in the finish line. I think I had four of them under three and a half hours, and they were all, like, 327 or so. But I was never a high mileage runner. I never really pushed it hard. I just would put it in cruise control. But I have heard since I've come down with Atrial Fibrillation that long distance runners are prone to that. So that may be the downside of those years of long distance running. Yeah, that's interesting. I've never heard that, but I guess it's something that wouldn't surprise me. Yeah, it surprised me when I got it. It was a jolt. The shorter the race, the harder they are because they become like full board sprints. Where I say the marathon is just a cruise control. I always divided it up. The first 10 miles. You get down the road as quickly as you can, using as little effort as possible. The second 10 miles, you just try to hold it. And the problem comes in with many people at 20 miles, because then you've usually run out of Glycogen stores. Unless you've done a lot of training over that, and you can kind of fool your body into thinking. And then the last 6 miles. If you got anything left now, you pour it on if you can. But I usually divide that last 6 miles up. I can go one more mile. I don't think I've got 6 miles to go up and I can run one more mile. I can do one more mile. That's how I divide that up. Interesting, but I did ended up doing 77 marathons and probably 50 half marathons. Half marathons became much more common because he didn't have to train as long for as long as it runs. Half of it was the enjoyment of running. The other half was getting to go visit places otherwise, just stay home and work. Chicago Chicago Marathon flat as a pancake in those big cities are the most funny. You ran through areas where you'd run for blocks and not see anything in English. We went around through Hollywood, and I was surprised except for rodeo how depressed an area it is really depressing on the boarded up windows doors. There was always something to do after the run, go and do some special thing or whatever area was in. It was fun going to Vancouver because of Stanley Park and other things that were there. It was fun going to Victoria. It was just a great excuse to visit places. I had another thing that I really wanted to bring up to you because when we started working for you the first week that we worked for you, we were taking a break or we were heading up to the cabin or something and you started telling us that you were a storyteller and that you were practicing and preparing a story for a stage performance that you are going to be doing. And you asked us if you could test it out on us. And we were like, absolutely. And you lit into telling this story. And when you tell your stories, you're screaming, you're yelling. It scared the living day life out of us. When I was teaching elementary school in order to maintain your credentials, you had to take a certain number of credits over a few years. One of the classes I picked was storytelling was at Cordulane High School, and our kids were fairly young then, and they had these records of Danny Kaye and telling stories. And one of the stories I picked for this class to do is called the clever Gretel. That was kind of the beginning, but we'd also just lie in the lawn at night up at the cabin, and I would just make up stories to the kids, just improvise love the improv. And one of them was about my favorite creature, the berserchenheimer tree gobbles brush snorts. But my boys liked reading Pat McMannis, an author of outdoor humor, and they would be laughing about him and rich and strange and all of the creatures and people that he had in his stories. So I started reading them and also and I could see why people would laugh at his stories. My favorite story is cigar, but logging trucks and noitals. So as it came up, eventually it would have like a talent show. And I thought maybe I'll work up a story and tell it. So I did. So there were a number of venues in north of Hideahoka that I could go to, and one of the first ones was out at the State Line. They had a dinner theater out there, and they had a big the Rock and Bee Ranch. They had a Christian music festival out there, and I went out there as entertainment in between to tell stories. And there was a Christian writer there, Frank Perretti, who was in one of the bands, played Banjo. We did some things between us, and he was kind of my fall guy for my jokes, and I could tell he didn't appreciate it really well anyways, but a lot of them were at Church when they'd have a program in the spring. Of course, I was much different than most of what was showing up. But people seem to get a kick out of it and seemed to think it was okay. But that was what I did. Oftentimes I would take maybe a part of a Pat McMahon's story, a paragraph, and I'd build a whole new story around it. Sometimes I would take his stories and just adapt them into my own way. And then I had all the ones that I just made up, that I just made up uphill skiing, for example. They were fun. And so eventually I ended up doing a program up at Priest Lake and where I was going to be the only one on the program for about an hour. And I thought, this is going to be challenging. And I had a good friend who agreed to video it. Oh, he's right in front of me. Aaron was starting to make videos. So Aaron came up and made a video of that. And then he did some of his own creative work. He did some interviewing of the owner of the bed and breakfast where this occurred, did some of his own creative work. And then there were some at the end, several pictures of backpacking and camping that we did over the years just in the Priest Lake area. So it ended up being about an hour and a half program, and I've given away about 300 of those DVDs or so to people. In fact, I just sent one over to a brother in law here this last week. I don't know. There's a year or two later we did another one, did another DVD with Apprentice, that I had a very gifted pianist, and I used my humor to set him up to play the piano. But, yeah, I love those kind of whacked out stories. That's kind of my alter ego. Maybe the real me. You are so talented at telling stories. But even more so, you are talented at performance like Pat McMannis. We've talked about this before. Pat McManus stories are just roll on the floor. Funny. It's just unbelievable how funny these stories are. But Pat McManus was never extremely good at stage performance, right? No, he didn't. And it was interesting because he would do a tours, and he was also a creative writer out at Eastern. But he was just like a normal person. He didn't have the personality of all of his characters in his stories. And so it didn't really work very well. But he was a marvelous writer. Amazing. You're a very good storyteller. And maybe we'll play a little bit from one of those videos on this podcast. It was a fairly uneventful until we across paths with old Grids. David, I hope you don't hold it against the boys. Too much for dropping you and the head in front of the nearest tree. So probably another reason why we shouldn't have laughed. David so tight. That a leader because, you know, most Idaho is a two broken leg. You shouldn't have a tree faster than a squirrel one here's the grids in the hot pursuit. But we all flawed and real loud as David managed to stand up and stagger a few steps before toppled over, and then we all shut. Our eyes are really tight because they agree they can do some really nauseating stuff you don't want to even think about, let alone watch. But fortunately, all that Grizz did was come over and sniff David over real well. David, you had to be commended for holding your breath the way you did there and lying there still and playing dead. But I got to suggest that, David, the next time that happens after the grim leaves, you is supposed to start breathing again. Me and the boys Redwood straws. You get to see who's going to give you mouth to mouth persuasion. And I got to tell you, David, I was a mighty relief when you started breathing on your own. And that ain't just because I was holding a short step, either. You mentioned about the yelling and the screaming. Some parts of the can get pretty loud. And one time I was practicing out here in the living room, the front doorbell rang, and it was the Sheriff. And they said, Step out, please, and make sure we see your hands. I thought, what, what's going on? They say, is there someone else in the house with you? Turned out my neighbor behind me thought somebody was getting murdered here or something. And he called the Sheriff's Department. And so they came in and went through the house, and I told him what I was doing and it was okay. Oh, that's so funny. You could hear that clear through the walls and out there. One of the very some of the special moments that I've had with you is backpacking in Canada. Even more than that, going up to the old ghost town Sandon and Cody at the end of Slokan Lake near the end. Yes, and spending time riding four wheelers and motorcycles all over the mountain and finding old mines, one of them close to 100 years old that we crawled back into. I've gone into several of them. Yeah. And you've done that. You've been doing that for years. You used to do that with your kids 30 years or more. I know you told us a story of a mind that since it's collapsed, where you went in and actually rode the car, you'd take the old train car and you can push it back in. They just walked away from it, left everything. All the equipment, all the vehicles they had, the front end loaders were all back in the minds. Those were fascinating years. Do you have any specific memory when you were doing that with your kids? That comes to mind. Sometimes we would do things I thought I would think, what am I doing up this far? It was usually not in the minds, although some of them could be dangerous. I tuned for a number of geologists, so I know what to look out for. If there's air moving through it, there's an opening above. And so you need to be kind of careful. But it was the climbing we would do around on the mountains above or trying to get up onto glaciers or whatnot that was. I thought, man, if I fell down or something happened here, what would they do? How would the kids get me out of here? Those were more of the scary things, like up at Monica Meadows in British Columbia. Yeah. Where we're driving two and a half hours or whatever on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere just to get to the trailhead, which then goes up to the Meadows. Well, sometimes we would just take the car and go backpack, and then we had a trailer. Sometimes we take the four Wheeler and a Honda 110 motorcycle, so we could have two on the motorcycle, two on the four Wheeler, and we would ride way up onto the ridges and then start hiking. If you could cover a lot of ground in a day, kind of undergirding everything, though. Everything that I do and everything that I do is my Christian faith that has to be paramount in my life. And so I'm always thinking in terms of especially with the young boys, that I've worked with many of them over the years is how are they going to remember working what we did together? What I hope mostly they get out of it is that it strengthens their Christian faith because everything I do is motivated by the Christian way of life, the love for the Lord, love for His word, and that's the singular goal in my life is to have impact on people's lives and that with the relationships that we have. Maybe I mentioned this before, but I'm not going to miss tuning pianos one day, but I'm going to miss all the people that I've gotten to know over the years. I'm not going to miss logging one day, but I'm going to sure miss all the good times that we had doing whatever we were doing. And oftentimes it took everybody working together to get something done. I remember Jeff, he liked to kind of work by himself, but just problem solving because I know the kids are never going to none of these kids are ever going to become loggers, but they're going to take what they've learned in problem solving and getting along with people into whatever they do in their life. And that is what I hope by the time their parents and grandparents, they look back and say, Now I know why that guy was in my life. Speaking to that, I've been running my own business for about a year and a half, and I cannot tell you, Mike, the amount of times that I am trying to figure something out in my work, and my mind goes back to the things that you taught us on the mountain while logging on the mountain, things that, like you said, none of us were going to become professional loggers. But all of the different things that you taught us up there, it's really shaped us into who we are today. And you've played such a vital role in my life. And I know you've played a vital role in my brother's lives and in many other young boys lives. And somebody recently told me and I quote, this, Mike, is the guy that to me defines integrity. And I know you're modest, and you may try and contest that to some extent, but I really want to ask you, I really want to know, how do you define integrity? And also is there an example of somebody who exhibits integrity that you can give us? Yes, your integrity. I'm reminded that nobody can take your integrity away from you. They cannot do that. But you can give it away by how you conduct your life. It's just how you conduct your life. What kind of character are you? Honesty, compassion, all the good character traits that Jesus possessed. That's what Christian is as a little Christian is to becoming like him, how you deal with people, how you talk to people, that you don't belittle them, that you build them up. Like I say, one of my chief goals is to make every kid that works with me successful. I want them to be successful in life. I want them to be successful when we're working together, and I'll do whatever I need to do to bring them to that point. Oftentimes it has to do with getting them to make decisions. I remember one boy I'd say, start out with something simple. Do you want to eat now or should we work another 20 minutes and he'd go? I said, We're not going to do anything until you decide you force them into me. And eventually they learn how to do those things themselves. But keeping your word. And that's a kind of a hard one, because sometimes you say something then you kind of wish you you wonder what you should. But once you tell somebody your word is your bond, I maintain that I don't need to make a contract with somebody. If I tell you I'm going to do something, it's going to happen. The dictionary definition of integrity is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. Yes. And we live in a time when moral principles are out the window. Yes. The diversity doesn't mean in the Church. We have diversity of spiritual gifts, and that's the strength of the churches are the differences that we have. Diversity means trying to accept some type of immorality. And you just can't do that. You don't have to be a bore about confronting it. But you have to stand on the principle at some point. If it costs you, no matter what it costs you, you do what's right, no matter what. And that's something that we're lacking in our society. And it's getting worse all the time, unfortunately. Well, what we hope is that people see the light and it's the heart of man that needs to be changed no matter what laws you have. You can't change people's character by the laws, but it has to reach the heart. When there's a heart change, then things will change and we need it desperately in our country. Remember something my mom said once, religion is what man tries to do for God. The problem is, you can never do enough. Christianity is what God has done for man, and what he's done is a done thing. So in most religions, they're always trying to do something of human effort to merit approval with God. In the Christian life, we live by Grace. Grace is what God has done for us, and we can't merit wheedle cajole or anything or deserve anything from Him. What he gives to us is by His Grace, and we treat one another in Grace. I have one big question left, I would say. And that is I want to talk about legacy and what legacy means to you. I know yesterday we were talking about your life and what you want to leave behind. Well, with everything we do, all that, we do what we say, we think how we relate to people. We're always building a legacy, something that we're going to leave behind for the next generation, whether it's your children or your grandchildren. And I think that's really important. I think about what people have left to me that went ahead of me and how important it was, what I saw in their life, because it kind of determined who I became. Integrity and leading to a good legacy. So you don't have any regrets when you go be with the Lord. How do you want people to remember you? I think the one that you mentioned, integrity, integrity. I'll be very thankful if that's what it is. But also, if there's a Memorial, they play the video realize Holmes goes camping because got to have a sense of humor in life, too. I believe God has a sense of humor in a number of examples of that. But enjoy your life. Just have a good time with it. My golly. I've been very thankful. I think the challenges I've got medical now are really bringing out that in everything. Give thanks for. This is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you in everything. Give thanks. Sometimes these things I can't figure out exactly. But I just know that since God already knew it, he knew it in his omniscience that I was going to end up with these medical problems. It's fine. I'm fine. If you live long enough, something's going to go eventually. None of us get out of here without something going haywire. So it's okay. You just adapt to it. You adapt to it. Yeah, well, again, I know I've said this before, but you've been such a strong pillar in my life, and I really have appreciated you and everything that you've done for me in my life. And I just want that to be recognized. Well, you know, it works both ways. Erin, you had a very good influence on my life. Plus, you give me plenty of opportunities to share with people. Let me tell you about this kid who worked for me. The success. Especially if it's somebody who's struggling. I can share that with it. So the joy has been all mine, too. It's something to be very thankful for. Well, on that note, I think we're going to wrap it up. I did have one. Unless you had anything else that you'd like to share any more thoughts that you haven't have. All of my stories end with the same line. This is the old piano tuner saying, whatever it does, it does heartly unto the Lord, you hear.