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Essentially Esther Banner

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

MY BROTHER 

My brother, Louis Lee Andersen, was born October 9, 1928. He weighed 9lbs. 2ounces. He was the first grandchild in the Stricklett family and was born at grandma and grandpa’s home. Being the first child the family took a lot of pictures. Mom and dad couldn’t afford them but aunt Beulah and uncle Ted were in the developing business and kept them supplied. I have enjoyed the pictures over the years….he was a poster boy baby at the time with blonde hair and big brown eyes.

He was with my folks through some of their very hard times and weathered the storms with them. He grew up to school age with very little allowances made for him. He had to walk over a mile to school and it had to be hard on him the first few years. Of course it didn’t seem strange to mom and dad because in their background kids walked further than that.

I honestly don’t remember too much of Louis until I was in the second grade. By the time I was school-age they sent me to Blair to stay with grandma and go to school there. They decided the mile walk in harsh winter weather might be more than I should deal with. When the year was up the folks moved further into Omaha and our trailer dad built was parked in the yard of a large old home. Businesses were built around it but that part of the block still had two beautiful turn of the century homes. The one where we parked had been turned into an apartment building. Two old maid sisters lived in the other and still wore clothes like “Little House on the Prairie.”

Louis was in the fifth grade when we moved to that location and I began the second grade. In a little over a year mom and dad saved enough to buy a house. We were then in the middle of the third grade for me and the sixth for Louis. We lived there the longest of any address in Omaha.

When I think of him now after all the years he has been gone I see him in a far different light. His artistic nature came out in everything he did. He was fond of making figures out of modeling clay….mom kept a piece he made of a soldier with his hands in his pocket. He let it dry and then painted it. I ran across it some time back in my mother’s things along with a small wood box with a metal top that had a hole-punched design on it. There was a wooden letter holder with a wood leaf decoration on the front. Those pieces are very precious to me now.

He was fond of making armies from lead he melted in tin cans on the old gas stove. I liked to hang around and watch him pour the lead into the molds. He had great patience and made model airplanes from the instructions, following every detail. I never had the interest to even sit and watch him with that. It was far too slow and technical for me.

Louis joined the Boy Scouts and had a shirt and neckerchief of the uniform. The patches he achieved were hard won. Dad worked from daylight to dark most of the time so couldn’t support his efforts. Whatever he accomplished was on his own. He was wearing that shirt the Sunday of December 7, 1941. We listened to the radio as planes bombed and strafed the fleet in Pearl Harbor…….and heard President Roosevelt declare war in his famous speech. It was a day that changed the America we knew ………….and certainly changed all of us.

Until tomorrow,

Essentially Esther