Spricks on the rocks

Anna, Emma, JoAnne, Alfie, Chats and Pam kibbutzed during a 1973 vacation at Castle Haven on the North Shore of Lake Superior.

A serious moment in a serious place

Among the places Anna and Alverna traveled to together was the Berlin Wall in 1988. The very next year, the wall would be torn down and German Berliners reunited. Many a poor soul trying to flee East Berlin was gunned down near where Anna stands here, which is why she look so serious. We don't doubt that she's monitoring similar events in Tehran this week with the same sympathy and gravity.

Stump-In stunts

Lord only knows what was going on in this undated, unmarked Stump-In photo. Looks like Anna was giving a speech (note how she kept her purse nearby in case she had to make a quick exit) as Mavis and Joe prepared for a dubious presentation of their own. Probably nominating relatives for the coveted Burnt Wienie.

Here's something you don't often see

Ye gads! Can that be Anna up on a roof? She of the most utter caution and care? Yes sirree, cousins, that's our Anna atop her new home on Poplar Drive in Red Wing, Minn., in the 1960s, adjusting the TV antenna so she could watch Walter Cronkite, Dean Martin and other favorites. Say! Maybe we can get her to help clean out our gutters. Another view of the Poplar Drive house, before a garage and back deck were added, and before many other houses were built in the area.

Smile, Sarah

Sarah doctored a doll with nurse Anna's help at Easter 1970. Note the setting -- Annette and Hart Kulseth's cool Maple Grove basement.

Wanna drag?

Cousins Sam and Dan Broberg made some noise with their dirt bikes in 1975. Helmets weren't routine then.

Anna and Alverna

Sprick sisters Anna and Alverna were always tight as thieves. A few photos from different eras: The glamorous gals were co-hostesses of the 1968 family Christmas, held while Dad/Uncle Bill was in Vietnam. We have no idea how they kept from spilling food all over those awesome dresses. (Alverna made her dress. At the time, she made most of her clothes, as well as mine and Cathy's.)

Two wildddd and caa-rraazzyy sisters! Here they are during a 1990s Elderhostel trip to New Orleans.

Ah, if only everyone read the newspaper as avidly as A&A. Here they dived into a tourist publication during a trip to the big island of Hawaii.

Young Anna robbed of her rightful As

Ever dedicated to historical accuracy and truth-telling, we recently dug up the report cards of our venerated Aunt Anna Sprick Smith, one of the smartest people we know, to see how she did back in the one-room schoolhouse. We were shocked, shocked, to discover that her grades weren't stellar -- and frankly, we blame the teachers! Consider the evidence... Above and below, you see Anna's 1929-1930 fourth-grade report card from Wabasha County schools. Her teacher, Leah Harlan, must have been a battle-ax! Who else would give our Anna a D in History??!! Or a C in Industry? We hope Claus and Maria gave that woman a piece of their mind!

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THREE YEARS PASS...

Thankfully, by seventh grade (the two sheets below), Anna had a fairer teacher, Dorothy Fick. Note the far better grades, although we find it hard to believe Anna only got Bs in Cleanliness and Respect For School Property:

The '70s .... 1970s or 1870s?

In this photo of several priceless blue plates, you may also notice some Spricks. Yes, it's Sprick siblings LeRoy and Anna, dressed in vintage wear, for the 1972 town centennial celebration in Lake City, Minn. Uncle LeRoy's beard is -- is -- is -- well, it IS.

A life well-lived

Norma Martin Cashion (July 6, 1917-June 17, 2009), an elegant, wise, kind, true lady, died Wednesday morning in Spartanburg, S.C. She was the beloved elder sister of Dad/Uncle Bill and admired Miller-side aunt of cousins Pam, Chris and Cathy Miller. You can read more about her, and other Miller relatives, at Pam's Miller family blog. Rest in peace, Aunt Norma!

Norma Martin Cashion, 91, passed away peacefully June 17, 2009, at White Oak Estates in Spartanburg, S.C.. Born in Winston-Salem, N.C., on July 6, 1917, she was the daughter of Charles Norman Martin [who died in 1918 in the great influenza epidemic] and Mamie Luella Jackson [who remarried in 1923, to Clyde Clifton Miller]. Mrs. Cashion was married to the late John Thomas Cashion, a local radio personality. She was a devoted member of Second Presbyterian Church in Spartanburg and worked as a medical secretary for Piedmont Internal Medicine. She is survived by her son-in-law, Dr. Albert L. Jeter, and his wife, Anne Chapman Jeter of Spartanburg; three granddaughters, Emily Cashion Jeter of Auburn, Ala., Elizabeth Bradley Jeter of Charlotte, N.C., and Amanda Frances Jeter of Spartanburg; one sister, Marilyn Miller of Winston-Salem; one brother, Charles Martin of Winston-Salem; a first cousin, Nina Hutchins of Columbus, Ga., and nieces and nephews David Edwards and wife Addy Anne Edwards of Winston-Salem, Dee Ann Edwards of Raleigh, N.C., Lindsay and Julia Cashion of Nashville, Tenn., Chris Miller and wife Mary Miller of Centerville, Minn., Pam Miller of Robbinsdale, Minn., and the Rev. Dr. Cathy Miller Northrup and husband Michael Northrup of Andover, Kan.. Mrs. Cashion was predeceased by her daughter, Terri Cashion Jeter, and twin siblings William "Brother" Miller and Arline "Cissie" Miller Edwards. Graveside services will be held at Forsyth Memorial Park in Winston-Salem at 2 p.m. Sunday, June 21, 2009. A memorial service is also planned at 2 p.m. the following Sunday, June 28, 2009, at Second Presbyterian Church in Spartanburg.

Thinking of Levi...

A family news alert: Levi Cook, husband of cousin Tanya, papa to the Cookies (Sonya, Maria and Perrin) and son-in-law of cousin Cindi, is in isolation in ICU in a Madison hospital with H1N1 influenza and other very serious viruses. He's on a breathing machine and under sedation. Tanya is spending as much time as possible with him, and Cindi is staying with the Cookies. So far, none of them shows signs of influenza. You can follow Levi's progress by going to http://www.caringbridge.com/ and typing "levicook" (no quotes, no spaces) into the "Visit a website" box. Sending you all our thoughts and prayers for a speedy recovery, Levi and family! If you wish to send a card, Levi , Tanya and family are at: 1302 Woodvale Dr. Madison, Wis. 53716

Here's something you don't often see

Your scrapblog editor and her hiking pal Heather (she of the morels quest) were delighted to find some showy pink ladyslippers Tuesday during a walk at the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden in Minneapolis' Theodore Wirth Park. June 9 is a little late for the rare orchid to be blooming, but it's been a cold, dry, recalcitrant spring. Heather took these photos as your scrapblog editor stood by gawking, wistfully recalling Mom's long-ago patch in Old Frontenac, Minn. Here's a DNR link to information about the pink ladyslipper.

Happy Birthday to two young cousins!

Happy Birthday to two young cousins... Zachary B., front row in this sweet photo from his family's visit last year to Disney World, is 10 today.

Katie H. is 15 (we think it's 15) today. All best to Katie!

June 6 will always be a solemn day

This has nothing to do with our family -- oh wait -- it DOES -- Uncle Ed Sprick fought there, and the world was saved (at least for a while) -- but every year on June 6, I like to find the dispatch that Ernie Pyle, one of my journalistic heroes, filed from Omaha Beach after the Battle of Normandy. (Uncle Ed landed here a few days after the invasion and immediately went into combat in France, where he was wounded on July 6, 1944, as you can read in our archives blog.) It's a good day to rent "Saving Private Ryan" or Ken Burns' "The War," and if you have cable, the History Channel is sure to have lots of retrospectives this weekend. Here is Pyle's dispatch (the title refers not to war being a waste, though it often is, but rather to the stunning debris it leaves behind): THE HORRIBLE WASTE OF WAR Normandy beachhead, June 16, 1944 I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France. It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead. The water was full of squishy little jellyfish about the size of your hand. Millions of them. In the center each of them had a green design exactly like a four-leaf clover. The good-luck emblem. Sure. Hell yes. I walked for a mile and a half along the water’s edge of our many-miled invasion beach. You wanted to walk slowly, for the detail on that beach was infinite. The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it. Anything and everything is expendable. And we did expend on our beachhead in Normandy during those first few hours. For a mile out from the beach there were scores of tanks and trucks and boats that you could no longer see, for they were at the bottom of the water - swamped by overloading, or hit by shells, or sunk by mines. Most of their crews were lost. You could see trucks tipped half over and swamped. You could see partly sunken barges, and the angled-up corners of jeeps, and small landing craft half submerged. And at low tide you could still see those vicious six-pronged iron snares that helped snag and wreck them. On the beach itself, high and dry, were all kinds of wrecked vehicles. There were tanks that had only just made the beach before being knocked out. There were jeeps that had been burned to a dull gray. There were big derricks on caterpillar treads that didn’t quite make it. There were half-tracks carrying office equipment that had been made into a shambles by a single shell hit, their interiors still holding their useless equipage of smashed typewriters, telephones, office files. There were LCTs turned completely upside down, and lying on their backs, and how they got that way I don’t know. There were boats stacked on top of each other, their sides caved in, their suspension doors knocked off. In this shoreline museum of carnage there were abandoned rolls of barbed wire and smashed bulldozers and big stacks of thrown-away lifebelts and piles of shells still waiting to be moved. In the water floated empty life rafts and soldiers’ packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges. On the beach lay snarled rolls of telephone wire and big rolls of steel matting and stacks of broken, rusting rifles. On the beach lay, expended, sufficient men and mechanism for a small war. They were gone forever now. And yet we could afford it. We could afford it because we were on, we had our toehold, and behind us there were such enormous replacements for this wreckage on the beach that you could hardly conceive of their sum total. Men and equipment were flowing from England in such a gigantic stream that it made the waste on the beachhead seem like nothing at all, really nothing at all. A few hundred yards back on the beach is a high bluff. Up there we had a tent hospital, and a barbed-wire enclosure for prisoners of war. From up there you could see far up and down the beach, in a spectacular crow’s-nest view, and far out to sea. And standing out there on the water beyond all this wreckage was the greatest armada man has ever seen. You simply could not believe the gigantic collection of ships that lay out there waiting to unload. Looking from the bluff, it lay thick and clear to the far horizon of the sea and beyond, and it spread out to the sides and was miles wide. Its utter enormity would move the hardest man. As I stood up there I noticed a group of freshly taken German prisoners standing nearby. They had not yet been put in the prison cage. They were just standing there, a couple of doughboys leisurely guarding them with tommy guns. The prisoners too were looking out to sea -- the same bit of sea that for months and years had been so safely empty before their gaze. Now they stood staring almost as if in a trance. They didn’t say a word to each other. They didn’t need to. The expression on their faces was something forever unforgettable. In it was the final horrified acceptance of their doom. If only all Germans could have had the rich experience of standing on the bluff and looking out across the water and seeing what their compatriots saw. (Also, for those of you who are interested in this topic, I reviewed a remarkable book called "Soldier From the War Returning," by historian Thomas Childers,' in last week's Minneapolis Star Tribune. You can find it here online. Also, a pitch: For those of you on Facebook, please make friends with "Star Tribune Books," a delightful site run by my friend Laurie Hertzel, our books editor, which links to published book reviews by me and others. Or, you can simply go here and rummage around.)

Moriah's graduation

Better photos from Moriah's graduation last night from Centennial High School in Lino Lakes, Minn., held at Northrop Auditorium at the University of Minnesota, are sure to come soon from her photographer mom, but here are a few snapshots to tide us over in the meantime. Congrats, Moriah! Moriah and her proud auntie, me.

Hannah and her proud auntie, me.

Three scamps -- Elizabeth, Noah and Zachary.

Zachary, who will be a junior this fall at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.

The proud dad and proud auntie, me.

The proud auntie (er -- me -- again) and proud mother.

Young Augustins in Deutschland

Thanks to cousin Britta Augustin in Germany, a faithful blog reader, for these charming photos of her niece and nephew, Sophie and Marvin Augustin, the children of Britta's brother, Bernd, and his wife, Katrin. Sophia will be 7 on June 14; Marvin is 4. They live in Ruschwedel, Germany. (As blog readers know, Grandma Sprick's maiden name was Augustine; the "e" got added to a legal document by mistake and it would have cost $40 to correct it, so the family let it stand. But originally, the name was Augustin.)

Honoring the aunties

Aunt Kate found these great photos of the Magnificent 8 Sprick girls: Annette, Emma, Florence, Alverna, Anna, Adelaide, Marion and Kate. Don't have a year on this one, but it was taken at Christmas at Grandma Sprick's old house on Washington Avenue in Lake City.

Anna, Annette, Grandma Sprick, Kate, Adelaide, Emma, Marion, Alverna and Florence in May 1961.

Hangin' out at home

Instead of heading to lovely Lake City this weekend, your scrapblog editor hung out with her No. 1 son, Noah, at her Robbinsdale house. The weather was splendid, and we spent a lot of time sitting out in the lawn yakking with the neighbors and listening to the Twins games. A couple photos: Noah makes a funny face whilst taking our family portrait. We had to keep a close eye on old Lucy, who several times was seen chasing a baby bunny around the lawn.

Noah is 19 and will be a junior at the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis this fall. He's living at home with me this summer, and will move back into a Dinkytown apartment with friends in the fall.

Even mo' Mo

Cousin Moriah Miller's senior photos were taken by the best portrait photographer we know -- her mom. Wish we'd had her take Noah's senior portraits! Here are a couple we really like: Next, a couple of Moriah doing her thing in track and field. She cleared 5'2' in the conference meet and, according to that unbiased source, her dad, would have been No. 2, not No. 3, if a German foreign exchange student hadn't won. Recruiting out of the country now, are we, some schools?

Nature notes

Nature notes from your urban cousin Pam: A couple of years ago, Uncle Joe told me to expect the emerald ash borer to arrive in Minnesota soon to devastate our ubiquitous ash trees (there's one in my Robbinsdale yard). Just today, the Star Tribune reported the first ash borers have been detected in the Twin Cities. So if Uncle Joe ever predicts a plague of locusts or terrorists, we better pay close attention, eh?

This weekend, your intrepid scrapblog editor and her nature-walk pal Heather will be tromping to an undisclosed location in search of the wily morel mushroom. Will we find any? Stay tuned, folks! Update: Didn't find any despite ideal terrain (it might have been too dry and cold), but had a wonderful day bushwhacking in beautiful woods nevertheless.

What I did on my spring vacation

The days of basement slide shows may be past, but now there's something even better -- blog slide shows! Yes, cousins, your scrapblog editor proudly presents these snapshots from last week's vacation to Grand Canyon National Park and other scenic sites in Arizona, where she went hiking with old pals. We didn't hike down into the canyon -- that's for younger, fitter, braver folks like cousin Dan -- but rather on the trails along the rim, good workouts in themselves. The canyon looks so cool in photos, but in person and up close, it's beyond splendid. A glimpse of the Colorado River, which carved the magnificent ditch over millions of years. Over time, water trumps rock, geologically speaking. Several times we saw California condors soaring over the canyon. With friends Jeffrey Rezab and Deb Farley. Met Jeff through Deb, who, along with her sister, Kathy, has been my friend since we met as hotel maids at Yellowstone National Park in 1975. A year later, New York natives Deb and Kathy moved to Minneapolis to be my housemates. In Minneapolis, Deb married Dennis Ferguson, who also became a dear friend. Deb, Dennis and I traveled to France together in 2004. Sadly, Dennis died in 2005. Deb now lives in the Atlanta area. After a few days at Grand Canyon National Park, we traveled south to hike and bird-watch in the red rock canyon country near Sedona, Ariz. Here, Deb placed a pinch of Dennis' ashes in a pretty trout stream he would have loved. Sedona is home to many funky New Age types who believe it is the site of several vortexes of balance and harmony. While hiking in the woods, we encountered many stone cairns. When I fretted at seeing what I thought was a helium balloon stuck in a tree in the woods outside Sedona, my hiking partners had a good chuckle, telling me it was foil deliberately placed by people trying to attract benevolent aliens to the "vortexes." To our disappointment, we did not encounter any aliens. In this photo of large, delicious margaritas, you may also notice the scrapblog editor and her old pal Deb. These we drank in Phoenix while staying with friends Jeff and David. At the canyon, we ordered prickly pear margaritas at the El Tovar lodge after one long day of hiking. Much as I enjoyed the trip, it was a relief to fly back to Minneapolis' 54 degrees from a searing 104 in Phoenix. (It was much cooler at the Grand Canyon.)