I first came in contact with him when I was 10 or 11 years old.

He was the salesman at Schmidt Sales.

We visited there a fair bit since my dad had an Alllis Chalmers tractor and Gleaner combine. Schmidt Sales sold and serviced both of them.

To be honest, he spooked me a little.

And yet, looking back on it today, I’m really not sure why.

Today I know him as a kind, jolly fellow who tries to make sure you don’t get one over him.

After Schmidt Sales, he dropped out of my life for the next 15-20 years.

The next time he entered my life was when I was a mechanic at the local John Deere.

He was a heavy smoker.

The front office didn’t think he should be smoking up there so he came to the back and smoked there.

For some reason I didn’t mind the smell and smoke from his cigarettes.

And, as often as not, he ended up getting a sales call just as he had taken his first drag on his newly lit smoke.

He’d stuff it in the ash tray close at hand and head back to the front to make his sales deal.

One of those almost new cigarettes got him in trouble once.

We had this exhaust takeaway system in the form of long 6 inch flexible tubes that we put over the tractors exhaust stack when we started them to take the exhaust away.

One of the mechanics brought in some newly fallen snow one day and formed it into a mini snowman that looked surprisingly much like him.

Next he put a red rag around the snowman’s neck and one of those hardly smoked ciggy’s in the snowman’s mouth. Finally, he lit the cigarette, put the exhaust tube just about the snowman’s head, turned on the fan to pull the smoke away and called him back there.

He was so disconcerted when he saw it that he pulled a new smoke out then and there, proceeded to put it into his mouth backwards and tried to light the wrong end.

Another time, while he was talking to us guys, with a lit cigarette in his left hand, lighted end to the back, one of us snuck behind him and doused it out with a squirt bottle we all had on hand to check for leaks in radiators.

His wrath showed through just a bit when he took a drag on that sodden thing.

I learned to like his visits back to take a smoke.

I don’t call myself a journalist in any stretch, but I did my own kind of subtle interviews with him, just because then, as today, I enjoy getting to know what makes people tick.

I learned he came from a farm family and his dad smoked and they had once threaded a horses tail hair down the center off his dad’s cigarette. Seems his dad was about as amused as he had been when we put his smoke out when he took his first drag on it.

Another time he said they put some sort of fire cracker in his dads cigarette about halfway down so that when his dad took a pull and it hit that firecracker, it all blew up in his dad’s face.

Seeing this side of him, I began to understand the way he continually jibed the people he was around.

I learned he was as Vietnam war vet.

I listened with sadness as I heard about a nine year old kid over there who had blown off half of his buddy’s lower body while he was riding together with him in the truck.

I also listened with amazement as he told of the reception he received when he finally made it home after that terrible time in his life over there.

Seems the home folks disgust of what the government was doing in Vietnam got blasted on to the soldiers as they stepped off the plane here in the U. S. of A.

I knew he got lucky more than not, so when he offered to go with a $20 on each of us picking which way a coin would land, I refused.

I knew he’d win. Plus I didn’t bet anyway.

His life experiences must have endowed him with the ability to see beyond the surface and to know what was being said without words.

He must have seen what I needed, even though I didn’t know I needed it at the time.

He had heard I had put a sprinkler system in my own yard, and it wasn’t but a month later that he told me one of his friends was looking for someone to put a system in his yard.

He wondered if I would ‘put a system in for his friend.’

And that got us started in a twenty year occupation that put groceries on the table and clothes on our children when my normal job didn’t quite stretch around.

It was terribly hard work. I’d clock out at John Deere, and go install sprinklers until 11:30 or 12 at night.

It was like I worked two days in one, with the second day being far more physically demanding than the first.

I know for a fact he knew how hard of work it was, and I felt his support each time I showed up, on time and ready to put in a full day’s work for my John Deere boss the next morning.

Another time he asked me to close in a bathroom he had framed up in his shed.

My family helped me with that, and I was mortified, come around 10:30 that evening, that I hadn’t figured my plywood right and the last piece I needed fit in place would have the grain going the wrong way from all the rest.

He told me to put it up anyways, he’d paint it so no one would know.

He thought I could weld decently, so when he and Bill got into restoring Cushman motorcycles, he brought them back for me to fill in the holes on the fenders so that they could be painted and no one would know there had been a hole there.

Another time, one of the sales guys had traded for a tractor with a scoop on it. The scoop frame was spung, resulting in the bucket hanging listlessly down on one side. He brought it back and somehow gave me the confidence that I could get it fixed.

And, I guess because of that confidence, I found a way to get it fixed.

He always told me I could stop in at his little shop here in town to use his tools or the welding table if I needed, and I took him up on it a time or two.

To me, he epitomizes what community is all about.

If what another man once told me is true, that when we finally get to the end of our life we are 80% of what others of have made us and 20% of what we have made ourselves, then I reckon he figures in to a large part of that 80%.

Thanks Sam Wehkamp.

But let’s be clear, I don’t owe you anything.