When we moved into the home, there was myself, my wife, one of our daughters and her husband in the home. One of the pictures below of the fire place and family room shows most of the children's pictures. I was currently employed at Caterpillar but on strike, my wife was in nursing at the hospital. At this time, our company which was formed in 1984 had been hired as a consultant to a local fabrication and machine company. We were hired to increase sales of the company. During this time, we worked and helped design a lot of the no till products. We initially got the contract for production of the parts. The company produced about 90% of the no till products in the USA. When our company started the project, the local firm had 6 employees and little production equipment available. In the course of 8 months, the firm grew to 60 employees, several new production machines, robotic welding, and powder coat painting. We were able to deliver and exceed expectations for production. While I oversaw the on site operation, my wife was making the necessary financial and operating decisions at the office, and working full time at the local hospital. We still managed to sell machinery and machine tool accesories during our busiest time. This was in the early 1990's long before computeres were in every market and home. All of the contacts with customers at that time were either in person, or by phone or fax. All the information was then stored in file cabinets and on computer disks. This is how we built our data base records. This will become an important part of our problem with Chase Bank as these are the very records they destroyed, and cost us over $500,000.00 dollars. This is the amount of money we had paid our employee's to make the phone contacts, and build the data base we used for sales. But lets not get ahead of ourself. It was right after we moved into the home that we found out my wife's mother had lung cancer. My mother-in-law was a very stubborn person and would not ask for help from anyone. She had lived in our home several years prior as our children were growing up. She was definately a force to reckon with. She got along well with my parents before they passed away, my father from a brain tumor and my mother, the year before we purchased this home, from a blood clot after heart surgery. I only make mention of this because they lived in Toronto Canada with government run health insurance and when they got sick, we had to bring them to the states to get any treatment. The doctors in Toronto had a six week wait to get a bed for a patient in the hospital. We still had mothers china and silver that was left to us along with the antique china hutch. Other than that, we had memories and pictures of our parents and our children doing fun things. Rides at six flags, fishing in the lakes, boating on the river, Christmas baking of candies and cookies, school plays and sports competition. These are some of the events that we had pictures and movies of. Normal everyday memories that are associated with a home, parents, and raising children.
This picture is of one of the offices in the basement on the home. The basement was big enough that we had a Haloween party that had 157 people and a five piece band and we still had room to party and have fun.
Picture of china hutch, china in the hutch and silver service on top of the hutch and pictures of grand children.
In the nex't section, I will explain how we used the home to give my mother-in-law 2 years of life more that the doctors had thought possible.
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