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This will be a long post as both me and Karen have a lot to say about Katy. I hope I remember the facts right, but if not, I’ll correct it. Here is my version:

In 1977, number four was added to our growing family. Kathryn Amanda Hoag was born on April 6. I don’t remember too many details of the birth itself. I know I was there in hospital for it. She was born at the Olmsted Community Hospital in Rochester, MN. This was my third time, so I was experienced by this time. I will try to get some more details from Karen.

Karen has some problems nursing Katy. (She mentioned nursing in her version below, so maybe I’m thinking about Kristy – someone can correct me) She just didn’t take to it right away. I remember Karen getting more and more frustrated as Katy wouldn’t nurse. So, the more frustrated she got, the harder the nursing was. Kind of a vicious circle. I might have given her a blessing, I don’t know. I hope so. Finally things calmed down and Katy began to take to it. She was probably hungry and had no choice by this time. But, it had us worried for a while.

Katy was a sweetheart. (still is, actually) But, so shy. As you all know, she got over that. I remember the least little things would upset her. A vivid memory I still have was one morning we were eating breakfast in the kitchen. I was sitting on one side of the table and she was on the other side. She was probably about 2 at this time. Maybe younger, I’m not sure. I looked over at her and made a face at her. She looked at me and burst out crying. I guess I had scared her. So, I had to comfort her and I knew I could always get a rise out of her if I wanted to tease her. We are good friends today and I’m grateful for that, so I guess she has forgiven me.

Karen’s version:

What I remember about Katy’s birth was the Relief Society had a bazaar (one of the last ones done in the church) in March and I wanted to participate so I was hoping Katy wouldn’t come until after that! Also you were still recuperating from your old-fashioned pneumonia. …She was born (if I remember right) on Good Friday, April 6, 1977. (It was near Easter anyway, maybe a week before Easter?)  (Editor: She was actually born on a Wednesday, Easter was the following Sunday, April 10) Katy was the only baby who had to be induced because she was overdue.I think Matthew and David were on their way to school when we went to the hospital for her birth. They suggested the name “George” for the baby. No ultrasound was available then so we didn’t know if Katy was a boy or girl. If it was a boy we planned to name him Ryan. If girl, we decided Kathryn for my grandmas Lederman and Rupp and Amanda for my mother.We came home on Sunday from the Olmsted Community Hospital. I remember sitting on the couch holding/nursing Katy and looking out the front window in the living room and also looking out the sliding door in the dining room (where I was sitting I could see out both windows at once) and seeing lush green grass and leafed out trees. It was gorgeous, a truly early spring for Minnesota. And I felt so blessed having her in the springtime. Katy was a cute little girl with dark hair the first few days. After we got home from the hospital she had blond hair. Didn’t notice the change in color until Allen Currit, a neighbor pointed it out. It had been so gradual.

The first six months after Katy’s birth were hard becuz Kimmy was only 17 months old when Kathy was born. So I had 2 babies in diapers. It was a busy time but after awhile they played well together.

I called them chocolate and vanilla: Kimmy in dark hair, Katy with blond. We’d go grocery shopping and people would ask if they were twins (when they got a bit older). Kimmy was tiny and Katy was regular size so they seemed about the same age to onlookers, I guess!

Dad

1977 was pretty much a lost cause as I was sick most of the year and I’ve already talked about that. Sometime between then and about 1980, the church decided that we had grown enough that we could build a new church building. So, the powers that be bought the lot right across from Mayo High School and the Rochester First Ward was born. This was in the days when the members helped do the actual work on building a building. They don’t do that anymore. I have memories (not fond ones) of going to the chapel and doing what help I could. I think I painted and moved stuff around. I’m about as handy as a guy with two left hands, so I wasn’t a lot of help. And of course, I was complaining most of the time. I told them I would rather contribute my money than do this work. As it turned out, that’s what the church does now, so maybe I was inspired. (or just lazy, not sure which).

We got the chapel done and I remember the Stake Conference when we moved in. It was a cool meeting. I was thinking Elder LeGrande Richards, an apostle, had come to dedicate the building, but I guess he visited the old ward building that we eventually sold.  I had read all his books and he was kind of a hero to me. I know we had a General Authority come to Rochester to dedicate the new building, but neither Karen nor I can remember who it was. We eventually sold our old building to the Jewish congregation in Rochester and they turned into a synagogue. I think it still was when we left Rochester many years later.

Tomorrow: Little Katy joins our family

Dad

They had a story on Channel 2 here in Salt Lake last night about West High School. It seems they are infested with bats. These are Mexican fruit bats and are migrating to Mexico. The bats like to stop over for a few days on their way to Mexico and terrorize people at West High.

I’m not sure when it first started, but after we moved into the Eyota house; we started hearing noises coming from the ceiling and the attic. At first we thought it must be mice. I went to the store and bought mouse traps and put them upstairs and in the crawl spaces in the attic. Never did catch a mouse, but continued to hear the noises. Well, one day we found out what was causing the noise when suddenly a bat was flying around in the house. Now, I’m scared of most everything, but bats particularly creep me out. They can be dangerous if they bite you. But mainly they do a lot more good than they do harm, but I didn’t care. I wanted them out of our house.

In the 18 years we lived in Eyota, we never did get them out completely. We had a home teacher for awhile named Brother Langston and he came over and sealed up every crack he could find where they might be getting in. That slowed them down, but it never did keep them out completely. We would get, on average, about one bat a year that would get into the house and I had to catch him. I guess there were times when Karen had to deal with them alone, so there were more than one a year. I’m glad Matt was there to help her because fighting the bats was a task no one wanted to do. I know you shouldn’t kill bats, but my rule was, if they got into my house, they were dead meat. I saw no point in letting them go outside just so they could come back and invade out house again. I bought a butterfly net which helped a lot to catch them.

A quick P.S. to this story was one day I went to work and was working at a temporary building just north of the IBM plant. It had two sets of double glass doors to enter the building. The double set of doors kept the cold out of the building and the heat in. I approached the outer set of doors one morning and just as I opened the door, I saw a bat flying around in the space between the doors. I couldn’t believe it. Were they following me? Obviously, I had no way to get into the building so I stood there thinking about it for a minute. Finally, I opened the outer door as far as I could and waved my hands and the bat flew out the door and on his way. Now I could go in. Someone was definitely out to get me. I was kidded about that for many months.

Dad

I have been out-of-sorts for the past month or so and didn’t feel much like contributing to this blog. But I will try to continue.

My memory is fading and any help you all could give me on some of this would be appreciated. We moved into the Eyota house in January of 1976. Karen said that it was a warm winter and it was very muddy when the moving van brought the furniture. I don’t remember much of the first year until I got sick. I went to work at IBM every day. We were writing a compiler that would later be used to build the System/38 (an early IBM computer). The 38 evolved into the AS/400, a machine that IBM still makes to this day. I think I wouldn’t be too far off to say that the AS/400 is the most successful product IBM has ever produced. And I had a small part in creating it.

We started out going to church in a little chapel over near the Mayo Clinic. I guess we owned the building. I remember it was a small building with the chapel upstairs and most of the classrooms downstairs in the basement. I’m not sure, but I think the first person we met when we stopped at the building one day was Brother Duane Mathias. He was there doing some kind of maintenance. I don’t think we had actually moved into our house yet. But he welcomed us to the Ward (It may have been a Branch at that time) and showed us around.

We had to stay in the Ramada Inn for a week or so until we could close on the house and get our stuff from North Dakota. The kids loved that. They had a pool. Eventually everything came together and we were able to move in.

Dad

While I’m on the subject of sicknesses, let’s review the other times I’ve had trouble. It was while I lived in Minnesota that I had something called an umbilical hernia. An umbilical hernia is a bulge in the abdominal wall within the navel. They had to go in and do surgery on it and basically closed up my belly button. It wasn’t a big deal, but I no longer have to pick lint out of my belly button.

One winter in the 80’s (I don’t remember exactly when), I was out in the back clearing snow off the driveway. I remember coming in the back door and feeling this burn on my right ankle. I showed it to Karen and there was this bright red band that extended all the way around my right ankle. It really hurt. We thought a doctor should see it, so we went in. He said it looks like some sort of virus, but no one could tell me where it had come from. They thought I had hit my ankle with the shovel when I was shoveling snow, but I don’t remember doing that. The red band started to widen.

They put me in the hospital and put me on antibiotics. I think they tried several different antibiotics before they found one that worked. They had no idea what virus it was or why it was attacking me like this. By the time they got it stopped, my entire right leg from the knee down was bright red. It hurt, but they had me on pain medication, so it wasn’t too bad. When they found the right antibiotic, they finally got it licked and I began to get better. I spent about 5 days in the hospital.

When I got home from the hospital, I noticed that my right leg was swelling up. It didn’t hurt and my first thought was that they hadn’t gotten all the virus. So, back to the doctor we went. It turns out that they virus was gone, but while it was there, it had killed the lymph system in my right leg. The lymph system is what the body uses, basically, to fight disease. Without that, my leg is prone to all kinds of problems, number one of which is that it fills up with fluid. The lymph system keeps that from happening in a healthy body, but my leg was dead and so those who know me, know that my right leg is three times bigger than my left leg. This is called lymphedema I spend the next 2 or 3 years fighting it and trying to find ways to keep it under control. Finally, I gave up. Today, I just let it blow up and live with it. They’ve told me there is nothing that can be done. I’m looking forward to an after-life where I hope to have two legs that are the same size.

Other than minor illnesses (like the annual bronchitis), the only other time I was in the hospital in Rochester was when I had my appendix out. Now that and the umbilical hernia are both childhood problems. The hernia usually happens to babies and if you’re going to have trouble with your appendix, you usually have it when you’re a kid. But both happened to me after I was an adult and both happened in Rochester. Of course, it just may be that I’m getting older. Everyone knows that I have had my share of problems in the last few years.

Dad

The pleurisy eventually caused to me lose about 25% of my left lung so now when I’m out of breath all the time, that’s one of the reason’s. The embolism started in my left leg and traveled up through my veins (or arteries, not sure which) and logged itself in the right side of my lungs. Since I had the infection in the left lung and all the fluid and the embolism on the right lung, my lungs suddenly shut down completely. I was laying in bed in the ICU and all of a sudden, I couldn’t breath. I was gasping for breath. I guess some kind of an alarm sounded because I was suddenly surrounded by several nurses and doctors giving me advise on how to breathe.

It didn’t last long and I got though it, but they told me later that I had total respiratory failure and was very close to dying. Needless to say, I didn’t, but I’ve had lung problems ever since.

Besides the breathing breakdown, I really only have two memories of that stay in the hospital. One was that I was able to watch the entire mini-series “Roots” on TV. My second week in the hospital, they played that series and I watched the whole thing. It was really good and I enjoyed it very much. The other memory was when Karen got to bring the kids up to see me. I think she had to wait until I got out of the ICU in order to bring the kids in so it had been 2 or 3 weeks since I had seen them. I remember Matt and David being kind of shy and standing at the foot of the bed and not really sure if this was their dad or not. They didn’t know what to make of all this fuss people were making over me. Karen was holding Kimmy, though, she was just about 15 months old. She carried her in the room and her eyes lit up and she got this big smile on her face and she reached out both arms for me to take her. It was a very precious moment for me. Kim had these huge brown eyes when she was little and to see them light up like that made me very grateful to have her as a daughter. I will never forget that day.

I got out of the hospital the end of January or the first of February. All together, I spend about 5 weeks in it. I couldn’t go back to work right away, so I spent the time at home, recuperating. It wasn’t until May that I went back to work part time and then moved up to full time in June. 6 months taken out of my life. For almost the rest of the time I lived in Minnesota, I got bronchitis two or three times a year. My lungs were weak and the disease was easy to catch. It wasn’t until I moved to Utah and a dry climate that it stopped. I’ve only had bronchitis a couple times in the 13 or so years I’ve lived here. As much as I liked living in Minnesota, I don’t think it liked me.

Dad

I don’t remember much of the actual move to Eyota. That first year is a blur. I was getting used to IBM and working in a big plant. We had bought a house that had a lot and a half. Us and the old guy who lived next door (Karen, do you remember his name?) each owned half of the lot that was between our houses. That way, it took both of us to sell if someone wanted to build a house between us. This gave us lots of room. We were able to put in a really nice garden in that spot. We had good intentions, but gardening never did seem to work very well for us. In the 18 years, we lived in Eyota, the garden got smaller and smaller and finally disappeared altogether.

I won’t be able to write the next 18 years in chronological order. I’m just going to put down memories as I think of them. Then later, I’ll try to unravel everything and put it in order.

Minnesota was not good to me, health-wise. I had never been sick hardly a day in my life until I came to Minnesota. Our first Christmas, in 1976, I suddenly got what felt like the flu. I had trouble breathing and ended up spending several nights sitting up in my chair in the living room because I couldn’t sleep laying down. After several days of this and not getting better, we went to see the doctor. I don’t think he put me in the hospital right away, but the first or second week week of January, 1977, I was in the intensive care unit at Olmsted Medical Center in Rochester. I spent a week or so there and then they decided that Mayo could treat me better, so I was transported over to St Mary’s Hospital which is part of the Mayo Clinic Complex.

I eventually spent 5 weeks in the hospital. I had what I refer to as the three “P’s”, (and I have to look up each of these to get the right spelling), pneumonia, pleurisy (Pleurisy is swelling (inflammation) of the thin layers of tissue (pleura) covering the lungs and the chest wall) and a pulmonary embolism (which is a blood clot). The pneumonia caused my lungs to fill up with fluid. There was so much that they had to drive a hose through the wall of my back and into my chest cavity so that it could drain out. To this day, the spot that they drove the hose into me itches. Every day, I itch back there like it never healed properly. Weird.

The rest of the life-changing illness tomorrow.

Dad

We moved the Minnesota in Jan or Feb of 1976. Karen and I went down a few weeks before we actually moved and did some home hunting. We got ahold of a real estate person and told them we wanted a house.

We didn’t have a lot of trouble selling the house in New Jersey, so I think we had some equity to work with in the purchase of the house in Minnesota. Don’t remember who bought the New Jersey house (maybe the people that were living in it), but I don’t think we ever had to go back there. We didn’t have a lot of money but we did have a little to put down on the new house.

I’m not sure if we even shopped in Rochester. I do remember going out to the west of Rochester to Dodge Center. We looked at an old house there and seriously considered it for a time. We also looked in Kasson and Byron and then the real estate guy took us east to Eyota. He showed us the house on Madison Ave. Well, this house was much nicer than some of the others we had seen. The main thing that made up my mind, however, was, I knew I would be working at IBM in Rochester. I reasoned that if we bought a house on the west side of town (like Dodge Center), then I would have the sun in my eyes while both driving into work in the morning and driving home again at night. So, we decided to buy on the east side and bought the Eyota house.

We were to learn later that Dodge Center was a really weird town. It’s the only town I know of, where when the church sent missionaries to it, they “shook the dust off of their feet” when they left the town. I think that is the expresson. It means, essentially, we are leaving this town and will not attempt to do missionary work in this town for the time being. It kind of means that the town is possessed. If you have heard of the movie “Sybil”. It’s about a woman who had 26 different personalities and ended up spending most of her life in a mental institution. Well, Sybil is based on a true story and the woman who was Sybil lived in Dodge Center, MN. I think we made the right choice moving to Eyota.

Dad

The PAR site was eventually sold to the Air Force who now man it and uses it to study the “Northern Lights” and also to catalog space junk that is floating around in orbit out in space. At any rate, it was time to leave. We had done our job and we were done.

IBM sent me on three separate trips to interview for another job. First, I went to Rhode Island where they were working on a small project that was supposed to last for 2 years. I ran into my old friend Ken Capolla from New Jersey. He said it was a good job and I would probably enjoy it, but it was back to the east coast (which I didn’t really want to do) and it meant we would have to move again in two years. I really wanted a more permanent location.

Next they sent me to Gaitherburg, Maryland which is just outside of Washington D.C. This was another military related job and it also was short term. I don’t remember what either of these two places really did, but I knew I didn’t want to go to another short term project. Karen and I were ready to settle down and stay in one place for awhile. After letting my manager at IBM know that, he next sent me to Rochester, MN

I interviewed with a guy named Bob Davis. He was manager over a group of programmers who were working on writing a new programing language. This language was to be used to write the operating system which would eventually run the System/38, a computer that IBM built in the 70’s and 80’s. The 38 then evolved into a computer called the AS/400 which was (and is) one of the most successful systems IBM has ever built. Rochester was exactly what I was looking for.

But, something happened which made me absolutely convinced that Rochester was the place to go. I’m superstitious that way, I guess, but I decided to take some time and check out the town. I wanted to see what kind of library they had and, in general, see what kind of place I would be moving to. I had no nowledge of Eyota at this time.

I was walking around downtown when I chanced to cross Broadway on my way to the library. I got half way across the street and there was this little old lady crossing the street coming the other way. She was having difficulty walking (as I do now). As she passed me, for some reason, she looked up at me and said, “Young man, would you mind helping me across the street?” Well, I naturally said yes. She took my arm and I walked her back the way I’d come to the other side of the street where I’d started. She said thank you and went on her way.

I felt like a Boy Scout. I had never been asked to do something like that before. It was really nothing. A small token that I could not get out of my mind. I felt that if this is the kind of people who live in Rochester, then this is where I want to live. I took it as a sign and went back to Cavalier to tell Karen we had a new home. As all of you know, we spent the next 18 years in the Rochester area.

Dad

In my opinion (and Karen’s too), the most wonderful thing to happen in North Dakota happened just before we left. On Halloween morning, Oct 31, 1975, little Kimberly Sue was born. Here is some details directly from Karen:

The most important happening in North Dakota was the birth of Kimberly Sue. I alluded to it earlier with David’s escape from being grounded so long when he and the little girl took off across the pasture in Cavalier.

She was born on Halloween morning. Dad took Matthew and David to Halloween festivities like the free movie at the downtown theater and then trick or treating. (I remember stopping by the hospital while we were trick or treating so the boys could see the baby. They were in their costumes and I guess the hospital let them in without any problem.) I remember one woman in the apartments who gave Kimmy a present but she also gave Matthew and David presents so they wouldn’t feel left out. What a thoughtful person.

I regret Kimmy has never been back to her birthplace in Cavalier. She was born Oct. 31, 1975 and we moved from ND to Minnesota at the end of January, 1976 (bicentennial of the country). Maybe someday. …

Dad