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I first met Steve Halvorsen in 1963 when he was a high school sophomore, and I a freshman, here in Rio, Wisconsin. He lived then with his grandparents, his mother, and his three brothers on his grandparents’ dairy farm north of town. I was living at that time north of town with my grandparents on their farm, with my mother and my three siblings. Our grandmothers and our moms were friends. Steve’s dad and my dad were elsewhere, out of state, at that time. The two farms were easy bicycling distance apart, and each of us, Steve and I, happened to own an old J.C. Higgins single-speed bicycle with plump twenty-six-inch tires and an unusual coiled shock absorber on the front fork. Neither of us was old enough to have a license to drive, but we did have the bikes, and generous schoolmates who drove, so we saw a lot of each other at school and at one farm or the other and managed, with schoolmates, to get into mischief from time to time. We both, Steve and I, owned decent transistor radios, and we, eldest in each of our families, occupied upstairs bedrooms in our respective farmhouses, where, late at night, we got a good signal from 50,000-watt KAAY out of Little Rock, Arkansas, and so we, as I remember it, were the first at school to announce that the Beatles were going to be big in the U.S.A. Beyond these things, I am not sure how much Steve and I had in common then, or have in common today. And yet, we, Steve and I, have kept in touch over all the years and all the miles. Each has lived a lot of places, but we have, through a succession of fortunate coincidences, both returned to reside in Rio, blessed with good wives and good lives in our old age.
I took the photo at the top of this page in 1968, and I see now that it shows one more thing my pal and I share, a fondness for Fords.
No doubt I am forgetting a few things. I intend to ask Steve if he would care to contribute to this reminiscence and add to the philosophizing about our perennial friendship.
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