Grandpa Lahman

From Jerry:

I have been thinking quite a bit about dad these last few days and just wanted to share some thoughts and a little trivia. He attended Northwestern University in Chicago but I don't know if he ever got a degree. He enlisted in the army during WW 2 and he was a lieutenant serving on the island of New Guinea, just north of Australia. I don't remember him talking that much about his time in the service, but I know that he was responsible for military transportation on the island. I believe that there was army hospital close by. When the movie and later when the TV show M.A.S.H. came out in the 1970's, he talked about the show as if he had experienced that first hand. According to Wikipedia, MASH units began in 1945, but were not used extensively until the Korean war. Dad loved that TV show. Dad was not really a big TV fan. He would watch sports and loved watching all of the Chicago teams, but other than that he would much rather read. He always had a paperback novel(or two) sitting on the table next to his chair. Mom would watch TV and dad would read.

He was always employed in some kind of sales. He sold bakery displays to markets all over the Midwest. I believe before that he was a salesman for Scott Paper Company. You know Scotties vs Kleenex was big talk in the Lahman house way before Burger King vs McDonalds, Publix vs Winn Dixie, or Papa's Pizza To-Go vs Dominos! He began selling life insurance with Northwestern Mutual and that is the only employment that I remember. He always wanted to do his own thing, and selling was the way that he was able to accomplish that. Shortly before I was born, he had a great idea that he and mom should buy a egg farm in Mundelein, a very small town in Illinois. He hired a man to live on the farm with us to help take care of things while he was working through the week. His sales positions always required over night travel so he was only home on weekends. As hard as he tried, he was never able to make a profit selling eggs, so that business only lasted a couple of years. I remember that before we moved to Florida he tried to market a couple of things from home with a friend of his. One was a jewelry box or maybe it was some kind of jewelry tree. The other was a toy scuba outfit for kids. Neither of those worked out either.

When Dawn and I decided to get into the calf raising business with our friend Skip, Dad told me that he always wanted to have his own business and encouraged us to go for it. Raising calves was not our best idea ever, but dad thought it was neat that we threw caution to the wind and went for it. He was always very interested in whatever work we were involved with and liked for us to talk to him about "how it was going". He was full of ideas and like to tell you what he thought. He was very logical and wanted to help you think things through.

Enough for now.

Welcome to the Lahman Family Blog!

This blog was created in hopes that we can continue the reminiscing from this post on Melanie's blog. Please contact me if you would like to be an author to this blog, meaning you can make posts. It's MUCH easier to organize information through posts rather than comments!!!

I will create new posts with the comments from Mel's blog so those memories will be recorded here.

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Melanie