I’m opposed to smoking marijuana because it might lead to harder stuff, like regular cigarettes.
-- TV talk show host Dick Cavett

I’ve paraphrased the Cavett quote because I couldn’t find it anywhere on the Internet and because it’s stuck with me since I first heard it in the early 1970s. In my case, though, I don’t have a good explanation for why I started smoking.

It was the summer following my freshman year of college and I was working as a mail handler for the railroad, the start of a four-year railroad “career.” The boredom of tossing mail sacks into or out of boxcars was interspersed with the boredom of waiting for the next boxcar full of Sears catalogs, parcels or (if we were lucky) the latest issue of Playboy.

The lifers took great delight in educating us young pups with tales of how life on the railroad had slipped over the years, of the oddball characters they had met and offering sage advice on dealing with members of the opposite sex. And they smoked.

Soon, I started smoking, too.

I remember how uncomfortable I felt buying that first pack of cigarettes. I felt even worse after lighting up the first one. Retreating to a bathroom stall, I nearly abandoned the practice then and there. Smoking left a lingering bitter taste in my mouth and upset my stomach. But I vowed to not let that first pack take me down. I’ll become a smoker, no matter what, I said to myself.

A friend, who saw me later that night, asked, “What are you doing? You’re not a smoker.” I just gave him a wry grin and puffed away, saying to myself, “No? Hah! I will be.”

Working the graveyard shift while attending school by day doubtless fed my habit as I did, indeed, become a smoker. You could find me lighting up at 3 a.m., among grizzled roll-your-own co-workers, who eagerly shared ribald tales of long-ago loves and spun cautionary tales of people who were purveyors of false knowledge by virtue of their extended education.

My smoking habit grew to 2-3 packs a day by my fifth year of college, when I was working 40 hours a week for the railroad and 20 hours a week for the Omaha Public Schools while carrying a full-time load as a college student. I was virtually living out of my car, napping and smoking my way through a troublesome semester.

As ominous as it seems to me in retrospect, my lifestyle at that time wasn’t that unusual. Just about everybody smoked.

Next time: Smoking, self-esteem and dating.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of Grey Bunny.

“Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette
Puff, puff, puff until you smoke yourself to death.”
-- Lyrics by Merle Travis (1947)

For some reason, those lyrics and the catchy tune as sung by Phil Harris (this version is by Tex Williams) have been running through my mind recently. Perhaps it’s the recent no-smoking laws that recently took effect here in Iowa. Or maybe it’s my own personal history with tobacco that has coaxed the perpetual sound loop from the deep recesses of my memory.

I haven’t smoked in over 35 years but for eight years prior to that, I was a virtual puffing machine. Unlike many of my fellow smokers, I wasn’t raised in a cigarette household. I’ve never known my mother to smoke anything and my dad had a nasty cigar habit that more accurately steered me and my brothers away from tobacco rather than lured us to it.

My paternal grandfather was a dedicated pipe smoker, though. That was a major factor in his premature death from cancer and the likely culprit in the emphysema that plagued his widow, my grandmother, in subsequent years.

I was a relative late convert to the evils of tobacco, taking up the habit after high school. I more than made up for the late start with a smoking frenzy that peaked at more than two packs of cigarette a day just a few years later.

With that danged song spinning through my brain, I’ve given my smoking life some thought lately and will be writing about it this week. I’ll tell you how I got hooked against my better judgment, how it affected my social status and why and how I came to quit.

Stay tuned.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of baam62.

Safety is a relative thing, for sure.

One of the primary goals of a personal historian is to save family stories before they’re lost. Many of those precious family treasures are too often lost before they can be captured. Once claimed, however, these priceless snippets of family legacy are generally handled with reverence and respect. Whether in print or in electronic form, we take all sorts of precautions to ensure that they’ll be available for future generations.

One of the most secure methods of doing this is the safe-deposit box at a banking institution. I use this method to preserve other personal and business records as well, figuring that locking items in a bank vault keeps them safe from fire, theft, tornadoes and just about any imaginable calamity.

But not floods, apparently.

We’ve been hard hit by flooding in Iowa this year and banks in a flood plain are just as vulnerable as anyone else. That’s a bitter lesson for the folks who had items in the safe-deposit vault at Guaranty Bank & Trust in downtown Cedar Rapids, where water seeped in through utility outlets to soak priceless artifacts.

A restoration company is trying to salvage important documents at a rate of $200 per inch-thick stack.

So, add this to your criteria when you’re seeking a safe place to store your stuff: Stay out of a flood plain, even if it’s in a bank vault.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of Patricia Mc.

“FORD: Drive the best, screw the rest.”

Those were the words on the bumper sticker on the truck ahead of me at a stoplight recently. Bold. To the point. Unequivocal. Reflective of a person with clear beliefs and a willingness to share  those beliefs with anyone who possesses basic reading skills and the slightest sense of curiosity.

I felt as if I knew something about the driver of that truck even though someone else may have been responsible for the bumper sticker. For all I know, the actual driver may prefer a Chevy or a Toyota. Still, had I seen the driver, I would have thought: “There goes a serious Ford person.”

While we all project our personalities and character in many different ways, our projections are subject to the interpretations of others. Those interpretations are based on their life experiences, not ours. Is it any surprise, then, that our first impressions of a person are sometimes off the mark?

The more removed we are from relatives in our extended family trees, the more difficult it is to really understand what kind of person they were. In some cases, we are fortunate enough to have observations of others to help us, but too often our assessments are built around sketchy details and dubious “facts.”

While it may be difficult to reconstruct the distant past, we have a chance to preserve our own family legacies by leaving an accurate accounting of the stories of those we have known in our own lifetimes. Now is the time to start collecting them.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of cameosteph.

Do you Twitter? Have you moved on to Plurk? Do you even know what I’m talking about?

Simply put, these are two of the newer social media applications for keeping in touch with people. There’s been a virtual explosion of these programs in recent years as part of the cyberevolution.

From e-mail to personal web pages to blogs to My Space to Facebook to LinkedIn to Twitter to Plurk to Wassup … there’s always something new to learn if you want to stay connected. That’s probably why procrastinators like me always seem to be a step behind. Earlier generations had it much simpler.

For generations, Americans got by with basic telephone service, often sharing a line with their neighbors, and sending letters and packages by mail via the Post Office. It wasn’t that long ago that a mobile phone was a true extravagance and luxury and that receiving a telegram by way of Western Union was a big deal.

Of course, my parents and grandparents weren’t as connected as we are. Being able to talk to my son in England over the Internet basically for free is something that wouldn’t have been possible just a few years ago.

But, how much is too much? True privacy is pretty much a quaint notion in cyberspace, the learning curve is constant and steep for many of us and just sorting through the constant flow of information that rushes our way each day can be taxing and time-consuming. There’s often a darker, exploitative side of many promising technological “advances” as well.

How families communicate with one another shouldn’t depend on technology alone. Talkers need listeners to be effective. Are you doing both?

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of jek in the box.

I’m a big fan of family movies. Family history movies, that is.

For me it goes back to “Citizen Kane,” the Orson Welles epic about the life of a newspaper mogul told in a retrospective style as investigators try to solve the one lingering mystery of The Great Man’s final cryptic words: Who (or what) was Rosebud?

As I wrote before, I think the Tim Burton film, “Big Fish,” is the ultimate father-son movie. Although I try to watch this film every June, somehow it eluded me this year.

Now come a couple new must-sees in this genre: “Young at Heart” and “Google Me: The Movie.”

“Young at Heart” has been playing locally recently as fellow blogger Jann Freed notes. This story about a singing group of some thirty 80-somethings who cover everyone from The Clash to Coldplay, will be available on DVD in mid-September. I find it perfectly natural that music transcends the ages. It was a 20-something Paul Simon, after all, who wrote the memorable line “How terribly strange to be 70” in his poetic tribute to senior citizens, “Old Friends,” on Simon & Garfunkel’s classic “Bookends” album.

“Google Me” is a quirky extension of the practice of Googling one’s own name. Come on, everybody does it – a quick check of one’s cyberspace status. When Jim Killeen did it, he found 24 other Jim Killeens scattered around the planet. He tracked down as many as he could and six of them participated in this documentary, which is now available on DVD.

The best family movies, of course, are those of your own family. Now would be a good time to dig them out of their hiding place and give them a proper viewing. If you’re a generation or two behind the technology (film or videotape, for example), you might want to bring them up to date before the equipment necessary to play them disappears forever.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of    Firstposter.com Movie Posters Wall.

Age is a relative thing.

I was reminded of this at a family reunion near Underwood, Iowa, this past weekend. Besides the grand potluck, homemade strawberry ice cream, cherry picking, balloon toss and clumsy volleyball games there was the opportunity to share family stories and catch up with the wide range of relatives, many of them unfamiliar, that make up the family tree begun in 1920 when Jens and Ellen Andersen left Denmark to start a new life in America.

Prizes were awarded to those who came the farthest (my Uncle Harold, from Florida) and the oldest (my Dad, Jack, 87). That’s when it hit me. My Dad will never be the oldest in my family, at least not in my mind.

Though he’s lived longer than his own father by more than 20 years and my other grandfather, Jens, by a few years, he’ll always seem younger to me than either of them. For whatever reason, I see my grandfathers as old men, probably because they carried the unofficial titles of family patriarchs for all the years I knew them. My earliest memories of my Dad, however, go back to when he was a relatively young pup in his 30s.

I suspect this skewed view of the aging process is common when evaluating people we’re familiar with. For instance, my view of former president Ronald Reagan is one of a senior statesman while I see John F. Kennedy as a robust, energetic young leader. But they were pretty much contemporaries, having been born just six years apart. My view of them is doubtless tempered by the fact that JFK was just 46 when he was assassinated while Reagan was nearly 70 when he first took office as president. Consider, too, that Martin Luther King was nearly 12 years younger than Kennedy and never reached his 39th birthday.

Do you see your family tree in a similar way?

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo: Jack, Elsie and Liz Lehmer at Andersen family reunion on July 5, 2008. Courtesy of lwlehmer.

One of my favorite television shows returned to the air this week, just in time to offer a respite from one of the soggiest Junes I can remember.

The History Detectives began its 2008 public television season by reuniting a family with a long-lost journal compiled in the year before the writer’s death in a World War II bombing raid, taking a stab at identifying the author of a once-popular book about the Mormon religion and trying to substantiate a family legend regarding fabled sharpshooter Annie Oakley.

Anyone with an interest in family history will find something of interest in this show, just one of many informative offerings that make PBS the channel of choice in our household. On Sunday, our local PBS station aired another fascinating program, “Traces of the Trade,” a documentary examining the slave trade from the perspective of a Rhode Island family that bought and sold more than 10,000 Africans.

Researching family history, which trails only gardening as America’s No. 1 pastime, has been much in the news lately, especially in the flood-soaked Midwest where sad tales of lost family artifacts have dominated headlines for weeks. The CBS newsmagazine, “60 Minutes,” reran a piece on Sunday about the growing popularity of using DNA in genealogical research and the limitations of that science.

The common thread running through all this media exposure is that no amount of science and wishful thinking can replace the deliberate thought and effort that is necessary to preserve our connections to our family’s legacies. The sooner the better

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo of two early television performers with a 1933 Bush/Baird mirror drum Televisor courtesy of TVteam.

We Americans have a long, erratic history with alcohol ever since the Puritans arrived on the Mayflower, toting more beer than water.

Soon after their arrival, our nation's first laws against drunkenness were enacted. Responsible consumption of beer, wine and liquor has been pretty much the norm ever since, if you overlook the occasional successes of a sporadic temperance movement or those 13 years of federally mandated prohibition from the last century.

You may have alcohol-related stories in your family. I know that my Danish grandparents grew their own grapes in Iowa and made their own wine during those prohibition years. My mother helped bottle it. My grandfather may have made his own beer, too. I know he had a fondness for beer, the cheaper the better.

The other side of my family was quite the opposite. They were devout teetotalers. I€'ve never known my parents to drink, except for a very short period when they tried sipping wine after reading that it was good for their health.

My wife was brought up in a family where even children enjoyed a cordial glass of wine with a good meal, a tradition we'€™ve passed on to our own children. Living a few years in California wine country nurtured our appreciation for that region'€™s wines and served as a magnet for visitors during our time there.

Our familial attitude toward alcohol is fairly typical, I think. We applaud the trend of producing local micro brews, thoroughly enjoy the renaissance of the Iowa wine industry, are grateful for the folks who resurrected Templeton Rye and will never understand "light beer."€

Generally speaking, alcohol consumption has been a plus in our family history. That'€™s not the case in some families, who have been devastated by the effects of alcohol abuse. Help is available from the National Institutes of Health.

The best thing we can all do is to serve as good examples for future generations in our own families.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of psunmsp.

Long marriages run in my family. My parents have been married for 65 years and my wife and I have celebrated at several relatives’ Golden Anniversaries.

But I was still blown away when blogger Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings reported the end of a marriage in Minnesota that had lasted 83 years when Clarence Vail, 101, died recently. He is survived by his 100-year-old wife, Mayme, and four generations of offspring.

Clarence and Mayme’s 1925 union was so enduring that even their grandchildren had grandchildren at the time of Clarence’s death. To put their married life into a broader context, consider that these events occurred in the first five years of their life together as a married couple:

Babe Ruth had his famous 60-home run season for the New York Yankees
Charles Lindbergh became the first aviator to solo nonstop across the Atlantic
The stock market collapsed on “Black Thursday” in 1929
Movies were silent and only in black and white at the time of their marriage and Mickey Mouse didn’t appear until 1928

Randy raised the question of who had the longest marriage in history. The folks at Wikipedia have taken a stab with this list that has Clarence and Mayme at No. 7.

What are the longest-lasting marriages in your family history?

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of RozzieM.