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We now pick up on my crash course in remedial education. But, first I would like to take a few moments to talk about my teachers. Mrs. Hillmer was a very wise country elementary school teacher. Instead of putting me back a year or two she recommended a crash course in playing catch up. Fortunately my parents were willing to go along and volunteered to help. My mother volunteered to work with me on math and my father volunteered to work with me on reading. Fortunately for me I had two excellent teachers. I'll take a few moments here to describe my parents. My mother was a real Amazon. She was about 5'10" and built like a Green Bay linebacker. Her biceps were bigger than mine even after I was full grown. She had an 8th grade education but she was fabulous in basic arithmetic. In the years to come she did the books for a fully operational dairy farm. Much more on this later. During the 20's she was a real flapper. For years I had an old B&W photo of her in her 20's style flapper mini skirt complete with the head band. I was told she was a whiz at doing the Charleston and playing women's basketball. Somewhere along the line she learned how to play the guitar and the banjo. Like many people she developed selective memory. To her dying day she swore she never smoked or drank but what she didn't know was I had a photo of her at a Chicago park picnic sitting on a keg of beer with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. She was also about 9 months pregnant with me. In later years I have memories of her driving the John Deere tractor pulling a baler with the hay wagon following behind. She would drive the tractor following the windrows and I would stack the bales as they came out of the baler. We had 16 milk cows by then and she would weigh the milk from each cow at each milking and write it all down. From that she would calculate how much ground feed to give each one. The production records also decided which ones needed to be kept and which ones needed to be culled and sent off to the meat packers. She kept track of when they came in heat and called the artificial insemination guy when they needed to be bred. There is a lot of record keeping running a herd of dairy cows. My mother was an original German Hausfrau. I forget the exact sequence but it went like this. Monday was wash day, Tuesday was ironing day, Wednesday was cleaning day and so on and so forth. One of my chores was to use furniture polish on the wood parts of the parlor furniture. This came later after we bought the big farm with the big farm house. While I was in the 4th grade we lived in the little house on the little farm. That first winter we bought a Guernsey milk cow and calf from a neighboring farmer. We drank the milk and separated the cream from the milk to make butter. It was my job to turn the crank on the butter maker till it turned into butter. My mouth still waters at the thought of fresh home made bread right out of the oven slathered with home made butter. Being poor wasn't all bad. Ma was a fabulous cook. She also had a very simple way of thinking about portion control. On Sunday she would say to me " Billie" go kill some chickens. I would ask her how many and she would look at me like I was retarded and say "There are 4 of us'. "Kill 4 chickens". All pies were cut in 4ths. All cakes were cut in 4ths. Bread was baked 4 loaves at a time. Being poor wasn't all bad. In any event she started working with me on my math deficiencies.  I had a mattering of 2+2 eqals 4 but division and multiplication were pretty much a mystery. However we waded right in and by the end of 4th grade I could pass a very basic math test. In later years I could never comprehend algebra and failed at it twice in high school but I learned enough basic math to get by.