A chapter from “An Artist’s Story,” the life story Lee wrote in his eighties. In his words, as he wrote them.

This was in 1940 and there were rumblings of a conflict in Europe, but it seemed to us then that it was a long way off in the future and we paid little attention to worries of this kind. I had other things on my mind and her name was Lois.

I had asked her Dad if it was all right if we got married. He said it was ok if I had a good paying job. Ha! Ha!

Lois and I were going together steady by this time and she had a job working as a waitress at the Home Dairy in downtown Flint. She was making a fabulous wage of nearly $25.00 a week and with my wage of $25.00 we started looking for an apartment. We found a small 3-room up-stairs apartment just a few blocks from where her mother and dads home was on Mason Street.

We were married June 29, 1940 by Rev. Cady. Money was in small supply then so we were married in Lois’s home on Mason Street. My brother Bud stood up for me and Lois’s sister was the bridesmaid. It was a small wedding with not many friends. Lois’s grandparents on her mother’s side, grandpa and grandma Kovell from Dundee and grandmother Sanford and Lois’s sister Jane. My mother Grace Mick and my Dad John Mick along with my brother Douglas and his wife Cleo made up the wedding party. Lois’s mother Leota Sanford and her father Lawrence Sanford were the host and hostess.

It was a beautiful day and I was very proud of Lois my bride. We had borrowed a wooden canoe from Ken Taylor, which we strapped on top of Dad’s Buick LaSabre and with our clothes packed in waterproof duffle bags we took off for Grayling Michigan. My brother Bud and his wife Cleo dropped us off at Penrods Cabins right on the AuSable River in Grayling. Ken insisted on loaning us his movie camera and we took pictures of our honeymoon as we canoed down the river.

We had a wonderful trip and a marvelous honeymoon with warm sunny days and warm nights. There were few others on the river as we went east and we found some beautiful campsites right at the waters edge. We put up a two-man pup tent and blew up a sleeping mattress and we were as comfortable as two bugs in a rug.

Lois did the cooking over a campfire and I must say that Lois was an excellent chef. As we moved from campsite to campsite we often had the feeling that some one was keeping an eye on us. Lois’s mother and dad were distant relatives of the Stephans in the Grayling area in fact the Stephans Bridge across the AuSable River was named after them. Two of the Stephan brothers, nephews of Lawrence Sanford, Lois’s dad, were trout fisherman and river guides on the river. And one night it so happened that we were just about to drop off to sleep as our camp fire was burning out and all was dark and quiet except for the occasional “Swiss, Swiss” of a fly line in use by some fisherman on the river. Then we heard some one say in a clear loud voice, “Is that you Lois?” We just about fell out of the tent but we answered, “Yes who are you?” And the voice came back, “I’m your cousin Henery Stephan“. We slept sound that night knowing that some one was indeed checking into our whereabouts as we canoed down river.

The next morning we awoke to find a beautiful river trout lying on a log next to our burned out campfire. What a treat that was, it made a wonderful fish dinner that day with all the trimmings, watercress and salt and pepper. We knew then that we were not always alone at night.

A week later the river began to slacken as we found ourselves at the headwaters of the Mio pond. It became wide and deep with many tall trees stumps sticking out of the water. The pond was very calm and wide a we moved over the surface at a swift fast pace. Thanks to Lois who by this time was dipping her paddle deep into the water like a true river canoeist.

About noon of that day we saw a lone fishing boat coming up river toward us, it wasn’t long and we could make out that it was Lois’s mother and Dad who had a favorite camp site all set up for us near camp ten bridge on the river west of Mio.

They were happy to see us and to know that we had made it out of the wilderness alive. We didn’t have any doubt that we would make it but it was reassuring to know that cousin Henery was looking out for us during our honeymoon on the AuSable River.

In a day or two it was time for me to return home and get back to work at Buick. We had found this second story apartment and we began to settle into “married life“.

This was a good time in our lives as a young married couple. Although we didn’t have a bank account we did have a steady income. We didn’t make much money then but we had all we needed. We could ride the busses downtown for 10 cents or we could walk.

The Capitol Theater or other places had many good shows and we could get in for a dollar or two. A “Coney Island” hot dog was only 15 cents. Life was good.

Mrs. Staples our landlady put up with our noise until one day she asked us to leave which we had been thinking about anyway. It just didn’t make sense to us to pay someone for rent. There was no future in it besides it wasn’t that great anyway.

P.S. The toilet seat made a big band whenever you dropped it. We didn’t know enough to let it down softly, oh well so much for renting.

Dad Mick had turned our old home on Nebraska Ave. into two apartments and we felt this would be a good place to live. He and mother sold us the house for approximately $4000.00 at 4% interest. We did not have a car yet as it was an easy transition to move from apartment living to a landowner with a two wheeled bicycle. I owned this bike for over two years. This bicycle was easy transportation and I always had a first class parking spot next to the watchman’s shanty.

It wasn’t long until our first son was born, Kenneth Wales Mick, born in the old women’s hospital on Lapeer Street. In those days a husband was not allowed to witness the birth of his children so I sat it out in a smoke filled waiting room. I always wished that I could of helped by being there. The procedure of childbirth has changed a great deal today. Lois was in the hospital for a week, and then she came home and was in bed for a week. It was my turn to help out, I took the week off and helped Lois and our new baby boy get acquainted. It was great fun but I had to return to work, too bad.

Kenny was a good baby and easy to take care of and a great joy to us both. Being our first-born we were very proud of our new young family. It wasn’t long then that Rod came along, he was born Rodney Lee Mick. Kenny was one and a half years old by then and Kenny and Rod were great pals as they grew up.

This was 1944 and the world was in turmoil. Hitler’s Germany was causing much pain through out the world. We had been at war for sometime and I felt pulled in two directions. I had several deferments from the draft and being a designer for GM Corp. I felt needed there but on the other hand it looked like I would be called up soon to serve my country even though we were about to have our second child.

What goes through one’s mind when heading off to war? Many things. While I am not one for worrying, the thought that I might not come back weighed heavy. But how could one complain about giving a few short months to serve my country? When I thought of the ultimate price that so many were paying to protect what I have, I am thankful that I had something to give even though it was only a year and 10 months. It did seem like a great deal longer though.

I left for the service on the 14th of June 1944 and Rod was two weeks old. I was able to spend those two weeks helping Lois with our new baby boy and pulling our affairs together. This was made easy because our folks helped us out by canceling our house payments for the duration. Dad Mick helped Lois keep things running smoothly in my absence.

This was a hard time for a service mans wife with two children.

I think this would be a good place to write about Lois the one person who I have known longer than anyone else. I met her one-day when we were in high school on a warm spring day in the year 1935. I had met a number of young girls before this but none of them seemed to leave an impression on me of some one I would like to know more about. She had spent a year or two going to junior high in Ann Arbor where her mother and dad had lived because her dad was laid off from AC during a down turn in the economy which was known as a depression in those days.

The first time I saw her was at our high school a- cappella choir class rehearsal that was always held on the stage of the auditorium. Lois sang second alto along with 12 others girls in the alto section. The choir was quite exceptional in those days consisting of 65 members with a very heavy concert year. There were even plans being made for a trip to Russia, but this never materialized and I am sure that it was due to the short supply of money in each of the members families. I know that our folks could not of been able to raise the $4500.00 needed for a world trip of this kind. But it was fun dreaming about it.

I started to set aside all the time I could to be involved with the choir because I could see Lois at all of the concerts. She was a hard girl to get to go steady with due to the fact that she dated a number of other young men. I think there must have been at least two other guys that she would date. It seemed to me that whoever had the money for a show or whatever, well, he was the one she went out with.

I think my first reaction was jealousy but later I got wise and I talked her into going steady with me only. I kept an eye on these other guys and when she was mad at them for one reason or another I asked her to go steady with me and she did. Of course I had to break it off with several of my other girl friends. Ha! Ha!

Lois was a lot of fun to run around with, she liked to walk and to ice skate in the winter and we did a lot of that at the old Athletic Park. She was a good student in school; also, she could help me with my homework. This often was a good excuse to spend time at her house and her folks were always at home, they kept an eye on who ever were there to see their daughter.

Some how I didn’t mind the long walk home as long as the snow wasn’t to deep. Many times I would be too late for the last east bound buss and I would get home a little later because I had to walk.

After we graduated from high school Lois went back to Ann Arbor to attend a secretarial school that was run by a friend of her dads. This was quite a separation for us. There were very few options for either of us because jobs were few and often times non-existent. No McDonalds or Taco Belle in those days.

Lois was living with her grandmother Sanford on East Ann Street just a few blocks form the big hospital in Ann Arbor, and I was an attendant nurse at the Lapeer State Home. It seemed to me that we were a long ways apart.

On warm summer evenings we would spend time together sitting on the swing of her grandmothers front porch. This was a wonderful time in our young lives but we would often be interrupted by the coming and going of the nurses who roomed upstairs. We walked and roller- skated many miles around the campus of the U of M. My visits with Lois were usually once a month, which were all too few.

She returned home to Flint in 1939 and started looking for employment, after some insistence from her dad. She took a job in the Old Home Dairy on Kearsley Street in Flint.

This was a new experience for her but she soon learned to become a good waitress and certainly was the prettiest one in downtown Flint.

Lois always went to church as I remembered and if you wanted to keep company with her you went to church also. Our first church experience was in the old congregational church behind the big telephone building on Second Ave in downtown Flint. Rev. Gans was the pastor and he had two small children that Lois sometime took care of.

We walked many miles in those days as I went into town to pick Lois up and walk her home. Lois had a younger sister who went to Northern High her name is Jane. She was a very accomplished dance teacher. Her dad had built a dance studio in the basement of their home on Wood Street and that is where she taught many young children to dance. Later on during the Second World War she married a dashing submariner and lived in different places in Michigan and gave birth to four children. They moved to California where their four children were raised. Her husband Russ Mercell died and Jane now lives near her children in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

As I look back now that I am 83 year old, I marvel at the changes that have taken place in our lives. We can see them now as hindsight, which can be good or bad. However the big changes that took place I call mega changes or inverted L curves and they show how incredibly accelerated our times really are. You might be interested in three of them and they will perhaps help us to understand what is going on around us.

The first one represents the growing number of people on earth today compared to a few thousand years ago. In 1850 during my grandfather Johnson’s time, just prior to the civil war, the number was some where near one billion people in the world. By the time Lois and I were in Central High School the world population had doubled. Then came 1960 and we had a young family of five and the world population shot up to three billion. And since then we are already at 5.5 billion. Now here we are 7 billion in 2001. This earth is getting crowded and congested.

I have always liked books and it may be interesting to you in light of the first growth that I am writing about to know that there were few books published until the 1500’s. By the 1900’s just before I was born there were 35,000 per year. Today there are over 400,000 volumes per year and that number is rapidly increasing. Would you believe I am also adding to it by publishing this one? Ha! Ha!

Here is another mega change that may be interesting to the readers of this story. All through out history until around 1850 just before my mother and dad were born the max speed of anyone was 20 miles per hour on horseback. This was so for thousands of years. Then the train came along and believe it or not it jumped to 100 mph, which was unheard of until grandpa Johnson came along. By 1952 the passenger jet shot us through the sky at 300+, that is when I took my first plane ride and we didn’t think much about it. It had become common. It wasn’t long, 1979 however and this speed doubled to 700 mph and we didn’t think much about that. And now here is a mind jarring fact, manned space flight was clocked at 16,000mph in 1961. WOW!!! All of this has happened in our own lifetime.

Lois and I are not into the computer information age, we are illiterate, and we may be to old to start pushing a mouse. But I do know this that changes that we have experienced in 83 years of life can and do often seem frightening to us. When we watch the news on TV and see the complex things that are happening to our lives it’s difficult for folks like us to make sense out of life’s riddles.

It’s very difficult for many people to operate in the same old traditional ways we did even 25 years ago. I read something written by Billy Graham about renewing our commitment to biblical principles that never change and he said that one of the secrets of living, when your 83, is the way we must adapt to all these mega changes with out altering Gods truth. So we read our Bibles on a daily basis and I would urgently suggest that our readers do the same.

Because truth is up for grabs if you don’t believe it look at what is happening around us, there has been a big shift in public opinion in only a few years in subjects like long-term marriages, child- rearing, homosexuality, abortion, integrity, capital punishment and on and on. I didn’t mean to let my writing turn into a sermon but this is something that I feel needs to be written. I don’t have a lot longer to say it. Bless You.

Lois and I were married on June 29th 1940. I had started working at Buick and we were renting an apartment a few blocks from Mason Street. We had little money in those days of course it didn’t take much and we got along with what we had. Lois was a good manager of our finances, she had taken a course in bookkeeping and her learning in this showed us that it was an easy way not to over spend. Each week she would take cash from my paycheck and allot the budgeted amount to be put in an envelope marked for each expenditure. Such as food, clothing, entertainment, etc. and each week we would not spend more than what was in each envelope. Whenever we had to over spend and sometimes this was the case, we would have to dip into an envelope that might still have something left over in the envelope marked miscellaneous. What we were doing then was borrowing from ourselves. We formed the habit of never going into debt and over the years it has always paid off.

We had very little in those days to invest; I wish we had because it would have been a good investment to buy stock in McDonalds. We bought a lot of them to feed our children when they were cheap food but as time went by and prices rose we never seemed to get ahead of the inflation rate, not with McDonald’s anyway. Lois always insisted that we could get along without borrowing and going into debt. She had more discipline than I had in this matter and she was right too.

During the time I was away from home and in the service Lois managed things at home with two small boys Kenny and Rod. I think back now and marvel at the wonderful job she did while I was gone. It wasn’t easy to be alone with two small children and try to get along with my army pay. She did a lot of trading of food stamps especially with her folks; gasoline stamps helped them a lot for she had little use for them without a car.

Our first car didn’t come along until the war was over and I had been home for a year. A good used car was non-existent. You could find a few but they were real Junkers with lots of wartime mileage on them. I took a chance on an old four-door Chevy sedan that Glen Terry, who was a school friend sold me in 1947. It was not much of a bargain; in fact it was not a bargain at all. I always felt that Glen Terrys used car sales did me no favor when he sold this piece of junk to me. This old worn out Chevy should not have become my first car, but it was, so somehow we made do.

It had wooden floorboards and you could see the ground fly by as it moved along the road. Each time you shifted gears the transmission would sort of try to rollover and push the floorboards into the passenger dept. One thing it did have was good gas mileage and the fact that gasoline was less then 40 cents a gallon we were not too concerned with poor gas mileage. Well Glen Terrys is long gone and so is that old Chevy that was my first car.

We lived at 1922 Nebraska Ave. about 5 years this included my army time. Kenny and Rod grew up fast. They were 3 ½ years old and 2 ½ years old by this time and I am sure that they must have wondered who this man was that had moved in with their mom. I had just returned home from Ft. Bliss, Texas, where I had been discharged.

Lois did a wonderful job in bringing the boys along while I was gone. She would put them in a wagon and pull them north to Davison Road to buy food at the Hammody’s market on the corner of Franklin and Davison Road. She managed to teach them how to get along in a supermarket, which was a real accomplishment. Then a long 6 block walk home, up hill, pulling those two boys with all the foodstuff. She said that it helped her to bribe them with an ice cream at the Spreag Dairy on the way home.

We had a hot water heating system in the old house and my dad would help Lois with the system whenever she asked. There was a large hopper connected to the furnace that had to be filled with a special hard coal at least a couple times a week. Lois would heap it full by shoveling coal into the hopper. How she did this was a great wonder to me. My dad would help her remove the big clinkers that would foam in the fire pit and they would go out to the road to be picked up each week along with other garbage.

There was an apartment in the upstairs and the rent from this apartment helped out a lot along with my army pay. Lois’s good management however helped start a sizeable nest egg in those envelopes she kept, it helped us get started again when I returned home. What a girl!!!

My biggest hurdle when I returned to Buick was to accept my old job back with out any change from where I had left off. It was hard to over come the feeling that everyone had moved up a notch or two and this was true. I discovered that I had not gained anything by being in the army for nearly two years. Many of the men that I worked with, I now worked for. It took me sometime before I realized that civilian life had moved along a lot faster than army life and where could I be now if I had not been gone for two years? Now I am writing this many years later and I have been retired for nearly 30 years. Most of Buick is gone, the Engineering building where I had worked for 35 years is nothing but a pile of rubble and I still have the strange feeling that something was lost during the time I was gone and it will never be made up. These are things of the past or water over the dam as my dad would say and you should give little thought about what is gone over the dam. Over the years there are two important things I have learned. One - I have learned that you can do something in an instant that will give you heartache for life...

Second - I have learned that the great challenge of life is to decide what’s important right now and to disregard everything else. We should always remember this that no matter what may come into our lives, No matter how terrible anything may seem from a human point of view, no matter what anybody may do to us or say to us, it is completely beside the point when GOD is in the picture.

GOD is able to transform the circumstances, bring good out of evil, love out of hate, and a blessing out of those who would do us harm. Here is something else to remember “it does no good to paint the pump to try and improve the water“. Look to Him.