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The picture above is of the current Alice Smith Elementary School playground. My how things have changed!
It seems like we have jumped right past spring and into summer. I would like to thank Odel Benhardus, Dan Fuller, and Emy Grant Current for their contributions to this newsletter.
I would also like to congratulate Cheryl Walsh Bellville on the birth of little William, her first grandchild.
There has been one planning meeting for our event to celebrate our 70th birthdays, and at this point, the committee is still asking for suggestions from classmates as to what, where, and when. Here are the responses these questions have generated on our class Facebook page. Again, you can email Claudia with your responses at cfinzen@aol.com and she will bring them to the committee.
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FREEDOM
by Emy Grant Current
Perhaps many classmates can identify with the “up north…goin’ to the lake” phenomenon. When I was a kid my mother, brother, and two sisters went north to help my mother’s best friend run a small resort. For we kids it was total FREEDOM…swimming without supervision, developing a thriving worm selling business (35 cents a dozen), thus having our own money to spend on ice cream treats every afternoon, and dancing to the juke box every night.
Later, as an adult, my husband and I built a cabin. When Friday came we headed for the lake. I remember my shoulders starting to relax about 20 miles out of town. This was FREEDOM with a different definition called relaxation…getting away from the job, sleeping late, reading books, staying in PJ’s all day.
When I retired I promised myself that I would explore my right brain possibilities; see if I was good at anything artistic, find my passion as “they” say. Now FREEDOM means the time and the courage to explore new things. We are mostly limited by our imagination. Trying something completely new is invigorating and the freedom comes when you understand that: you don’t have to be accomplished, you don’t have to explain, you don’t have to justify, you don’t even have to finish. Now that’s FREEDOM!
Emy Current (Grant)
emycurrent@msn.com
*Please share some of your trials, errors, and accomplishments since retirement. It’s a whole new era for new ideas. What new thoughts and perspectives are you contemplating? What re-inventions are taking place? What have you done lately? Brag or complain…it’s O.K.
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FOR THE LOVE OF CORVETTES
Interview with Odel Behnardus
okbenhardus@msn.com
If you attended our 50th class reunion, you could not help but notice the line of classic cars along the curved driveway in front of the entrance to our event. These were loaned to us for the night by Odel Benhardus. Many of us had our pictures taken with these cars. Others, like me, did not, and now wish we had. Because Odel's cars were such a hit, I decided I would like to hear more from him about his collection and what inspired him to begin collecting these beautiful cars.
Odel thinks he got started collecting cars because of his dad's Buick Dynaflow. That is the car he had to drive after getting his license. It was ugly and slow, and no match for the '58-'59 Impalas some of his friends were driving to church. I asked him if he used to "cruise Main". He said he did with friends, in their cars, but never drove his own. He did not want to be seen in public with that Buick. He felt deprived, having to drive the Buick, so he is now making up for it. At age 18, Odel was finally able to get his own first real car - it was a '50 Chevy fastback that he bought for $25.00.
Odel's first 'collectible' car was a '31 Model A Ford . He first became interested in Model A's because at the end of our senior year, Larry Rohrschneider had one and he liked it. He said at that point in his life, he mainly valued girls and cars. Odel bought his Model A from a neighbor, again for $25.00. He built it up pretty much from scratch. He put in a '52 Olds engine, used a hacksaw to cut the frame, and got a newer front end out of the junkyard. He learned how to paint by painting this car, and he painted it yellow. He still has it.
He has added to his collection over the years, and now Odel has five Corvettes, the Model A Ford, a 66 Impala Supersport and two go karts. He says when you collect, one is never enough. At first he thought it was crazy to have five Corvettes, but he has gotten over it.
I asked him what cars are his favorites. Of course, he answered, "Corvettes" A yellow Corvette tops the list. It is a '63 Corvette split window coupe, and it was the only year they made it. He has a black '59 that has smooth lines, a yellow '74 convertible with the big 454 engine and a different personality, and a red '85 because they did not make yellow that year. He says at least he did not have to get a white one, since they have the least resale value. He bought it a year old and his wife likes driving that one. He also has a yellow '05. He had been looking for one on the internet when he found a yellow coupe with a 6 speed manual, but it was in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The next day he was on a plane. He drove it home getting 28 mpg on the highway. He hopes he can continue to keep driving manual transmissions, even into his 'old age'.
I asked him what makes a car collectible. He said liking a car and 'having to have it' is the first reason to buy it. It also should have something unique about it, and the number of cars made of that model should be low. He said when he bought the '59 Vette he never even drove it or looked at it before buying it because he already had the '60 and knew the problem areas. He also says do not touch the original paint. If he were to give advice to someone wanting to start collecting cars, he says "Buy as nice a car as you can, because it costs a lot to restore them, and do your homework."
Then I asked Odel what he thought were the best designed cars over the years. He said he thinks the '63 Corvette is beautiful, along with the early Ford Mustang fastback, and that the same guy designed both of those cars. He prefers American to foreign cars. He had a Mitsubishi years ago, had it rustproofed, and it rusted out anyway, but the mid-sized Chevy he bought for his daughter lasted for years. He likes the Mazda '77, and says it drove nice. When buying a car, it also helps to know your market and have a lot of money. If you have a choice between two cars, he says to buy the better one. He attended a car auction in Arizona a few years ago where a Volkswagen bus went for $100,000. He says he wondered at the time if they test the mental ability of those people willing to pay that much for a VW bus that is very slow with no horsepower, but also notices that in every late '50s to early 60s show, there is a VW bus, so maybe the buyers did know what they were doing.
It is no surprise that Odel's favorite car manufacturer is Chevy - he has one car that is not a Chevy. It is an '02 PT Cruiser. If you haven't already guessed, his favorite color for a car is yellow. In the summer he has 8-9 cars to choose from, if he wants to drive around. He has a cool old truck with a manual transmission with a big engine that he used to use to pull his race car and can accelerate going up hills. He does not drive the truck in the winter because it has new fenders. He drives the cars as much as he can. In the winter they stay in. In the summer he will take one out, drive it for a week or so, then trade it for another.
Every other Tuesday Odel would take his cars to the 7-Hi at the junction of 101 and Hwy 7 and display them. He occasionally will put one or two in a show. He has shown some in a car show in the Civic Center in Mpls. In his biggest car show ever, he took a 2nd place trophy on the '63 Corvette. He is in a car club that rents a track in Brainerd every summer and has shown a couple of cars there, and also has raced the '63 Corvette there two summers. Then he raced the '59 a few years, raced the '85 and raced the '74 on smaller tracks, but has never raced the '05.
Odel started racing his cars at age 54, an age where most racers stop racing. He raced for five years, but he had problems with chronic fatigue, and after hitting the wall on the straightaway, let his son take over the racing. He raced his cars at the Shakopee track for 14 years, and said it was a good way to spend time with one's son. He started with a Chevette 1.6 liter engine and ended with a mustang 2.3 liter engine. His son raced two years ago and won four features, three heats, second place in the points, and the car had no dents anywhere. The Shakopee Raceway Park is now torn down but it was a 1/4 mile asphalt track, so you are constantly turning left. A heat race is 8 laps and a feature is 15-20 laps. He was hoping to race far into his '60s, but that was not to be.
I asked what to do to keep a car in pristine condition. Odel says to keep the car clean and out of the sun and to use McGuire's wax if planning to show the car.
Odel says he keeps his cars in a detached garage. I was curious about what his cars are worth, today. He said the Impala that he paid his school librarian $800 for is now worth around $20,000. The '59 Corvette has gone up to around $85,000. The '63 Corvette that he paid $19,095 for is now in the $60,000 range.
He does not rent out his cars, and says if he did, the insurance people would go nuts and the rates would be crazy. He has gotten a couple of speeding tickets over the years - once for doing 70 down the 101. Odel says he took his granddaughter, age 4, for a ride in one of his Corvettes, last year. He took it to 75-80, and she was saying "go fast Boppa, go fast". I guess it's in the blood.
Odel loves to talk cars, and says to give him a call.
Thanks, Odel!
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Thanks to Dan Fuller, for finding the following article that should make us feel better about any 'old age' symptoms we have been having:
dfuller63@gmail.com
What happens to our cognitive abilities as we age? If your think our brains go into a steady decline, research reported this week in theJournal Topics in Cognitive Science may make you think again. The work, headed by Dr. Michael Ramscar of Tübingen University, takes a critical look at the measures usually thought to show that our cognitive abilities decline across adulthood. Instead of finding evidence of decline, the team discovered that most standard cognitive measures, which date back to the early twentieth century, are flawed. "The human brain works slower in old age," says Ramscar, "but only because we have stored more information over time."
Computers were trained, like humans, to read a certain amount each day, and to learn new things. When the researchers let a computer "read" only so much, its performance on cognitive tests resembled that of a young adult. But if the same computer was exposed to the experiences we might encounter over a lifetime -- with reading simulated over decades -- its performance now looked like that of an older adult. Often it was slower, but not because its processing capacity had declined. Rather, increased "experience" had caused the computer's database to grow, giving it more data to process -- which takes time.
Technology now allows researchers to make quantitative estimates of the number of words an adult can be expected to learn across a lifetime, enabling the Tübingen team to separate the challenge that increasing knowledge poses to memory from the actual performance of memory itself. "Imagine someone who knows two people's birthdays and can recall them almost perfectly. Would you really want to say that person has a better memory than a person who knows the birthdays of 2000 people, but can 'only' match the right person to the right birthday nine times out of ten?" asks Ramscar.
The answer appears to be "no." When Ramscar's team trained their computer models on huge linguistic datasets, they found that standardized vocabulary tests, which are used to take account of the growth of knowledge in studies of aging, massively underestimate the size of adult vocabularies. It takes computers longer to search databases of words as their sizes grow, which is hardly surprising but may have important implications for our understanding of age-related slowdowns. The researchers found that to get their computers to replicate human performance in word recognition tests across adulthood, they had to keep their capacities the same. "Forget about forgetting," explained Tübingen researcher Peter Hendrix, "if I wanted to get the computer to look like an older adult, I had to keep all the words it learned in memory and let them compete for attention."
The research shows that studies of the problems older people have with recalling names suffer from a similar blind spot: there is a far greater variety of given names today than there were two generations ago. This cultural shift toward greater name diversity means the number of different names anyone learns over their lifetime has increased dramatically. The work shows how this makes locating a name in memory far harder than it used to be. Even for computers.
Ramscar and his colleagues' work provides more than an explanation of why, in the light of all the extra information they have to process, we might expect older brains to seem slower and more forgetful than younger brains. Their work also shows how changes in test performance that have been taken as evidence for declining cognitive abilities in fact demonstrates older adults' greater mastery of the knowledge they have acquired.
Take "paired-associate learning," a commonly used cognitive test that involves learning to connect words like "up" to "down" or "necktie" to "cracker" in memory. Using Big Data sets to quantify how often different words appear together in English, the Tuebingen team show that younger adults do better when asked to learn to pair "up" with "down" than "necktie" and "cracker" because "up" and "down" appear in close proximity to one another more frequently. However, whereas older adults also understand which words don't usually go together, young adults notice this less. When the researchers examined performance on this test across a range of word pairs that go together more and less in English, they found older adult's scores to be far more closely attuned to the actual information in hundreds of millions of words of English than their younger counterparts.
As Prof. Harald Baayen, who heads the Alexander von Humboldt Quantitative Linguistics research group where the work was carried out puts it, "If you think linguistic skill involves something like being able to choose one word given another, younger adults seem to do better in this task. But, of course, proper understanding of language involves more than this. You have also to not put plausible but wrong pairs of words together. The fact that older adults find nonsense pairs -- but not connected pairs -- harder to learn than young adults simply demonstrates older adults' much better understanding of language. They have to make more of an effort to learn unrelated word pairs because, unlike the youngsters, they know a lot about which words don't belong together."
The Tübingen research conclude that we need different tests for the cognitive abilities of older people -- taking into account the nature and amount of information our brains process. "The brains of older people do not get weak," says Michael Ramscar. "On the contrary, they simply know more."
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Universitaet Tübingen. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
- Michael Ramscar, Peter Hendrix, Cyrus Shaoul, Petar Milin, Harald Baayen. The Myth of Cognitive Decline: Non-Linear Dynamics of Lifelong Learning. Topics in Cognitive Science, 2014; DOI: 10.1111/tops.12078
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It is with sadness that I report the passing of Rick Brown on May 20th. Condolences can be sent to his family in care of his son, Adam Brown: 5825 Hyland Court Dr. Bloomington, MN.
We send condolences to Sherry Johnson Underdahl on the sudden passing of her son this past week. Sherry's address is 4100 Ranchview Ln N, Plymouth, MN 55446; jhunderd@ties2.net .
We also extend condolences to Bob Stohl on the loss of his sister, Elizabeth, on May 12th; Bob's address is 1632 Hoyt Ave., Everett, WA 98201; MDStohl@frontier.com .
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