In July, 2004, I spent a day in Curlew, Iowa, helping Dave and Karen Dreher prime and paint the old Wilson house they had bought for their retirement. My childhood buddy, Bryan Wilson, had grown up in that house. Bryan was killed in Vietnam. This is part of a report of my day with the Drehers.
8:01 a.m. I'm knocking
on the front door of the Wilson house. "Come in, come in," I hear Karen Dreher call from the parlor.
"I'm Tom Montag," I say.
"I'm Karen Dreher," she says. She calls out, "Dave, Tom is here," and she leads me through the house to the back room off the kitchen where Dave and Karen's brother Jim are trying to put up a light fixture and ceiling fan.
"How long are you in the area?" Dave asks.
"Til tomorrow," I say. "I came to spend a day helping here."
In the e-mail he didn't get, I'd told Dave I wasn't very good with a hammer but I could handle a paintbrush. Karen had been priming in the parlor with a grey primer when I came in and I could help her with that.
Karen had been working atop a ladder, carefully putting a line of grey primer at the top of the wall where it met the white of the ceiling, as well as priming the top two feet of the wall. She got me a roller and a pan, and I primed the rest of the way to the floor. We talked as we worked, Karen and I - a little of this, a little of that, and I was very comfortable in the house, with its ghosts, with these people. "We're just common, down-home folks" is how Dave will put it at one point, and that's it exactly.
Dave had been raised in Emmetsburg, Iowa, from 1945 until 1961, when his family moved to Minnesota. He graduated from Red Wing High School. Karen grew up on a farm near Rodman, some ten miles from Emmetsburg, and graduated from Emmetsburg High School. Dave and Karen had gone to the same church. Karen baby-sat for Dave's sister's children. Dave would come back to Emmetsburg during the summer. In 1967-1968, he taught math at the high school in Mallard, twelve miles south of Emmetsburg.
Dave started courting Karen after he quit teaching, and the couple was engaged before Dave went off to service in 1968. He came home from Vietnam on May 20, 1970. Karen had studied to become a lab technician; she interned in Alexandria, Minnesota, and worked for a year in Slayton Minnesota.
Dave and Karen were married in March, 1971.
When Dave got out of service, he went back to school, studying accounting at the University of Minnesota on the GI Bill, taking a couple courses at a time while working at American Can Company as a machine operator. He made Spam cans and vegetable cans and C-ration cans, big ham cans, pop cans, beer cans, aerosol cans, you name it. Second shift. A lot of twelve-hours-a-day-seven-days-a-week.
After he finished the accounting program in March 1974, Dave got a job in cost accounting with 3-M and worked for the company in the Twin Cities from April 29, 1974 to December 31, 1985, then for Harris Lanier/Lanier World Wide in Atlanta. Though he took early retirement in May, 2000, he was asked to come back to Lanier, which was later bought by Ricoh.
The Drehers raised three daughters: Janell, Amy, and Diane; two of them still live in the Atlanta area, one in Indiana.
To be continued....
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