Considered Opinions

I often wish my dad were still around to ask his advice about something, or I would like to hear my mom talk about something she experienced as a young girl growing up on a farm in southern Michigan. I also miss being able to listen to my grandfather Shively tell stories about his life and my uncle Jim’s stories of dodging Japanese submarines in the Pacific during WWII.

Dad made an effort I still greatly appreciate by writing dozens of stories about his life. In his late 70s and 80s, personal computers were just becoming readily available. He wrote tirelessly using the primitive word processors of the time and printed them on paper, which he kept in a loose-leaf binder called “The Book”. Later, I scanned them all to create a website that still attracts interest from readers around the world seeking information about Corliss engines, or the REA, or other interesting tidbits. I am trying to follow in his footsteps by writing down my ideas, opinions, and experiences as I recall them.

I used to say that I had opinions on anything and everything. What I should have been saying is that I have “ideas” about everything but “opinions” about only things I understand. As I write, I will attempt to distinguish between my “ideas” and my “considered opinions”. Both are listed by subject matter in the menu on the left and soon will be listed chronologically in a table on the home page.

This website also links to two other websites that are designed to document information about Patchen and Old Summit Forest Products. Hopefully, this will be of value to my daughter Kelley as she takes the reigns of these companies and continues to grow them.

Readers have occasionally asked about this URL since “Kisama” has no apparent connection to either the author or to the content of the Website. Those having an understanding of the Japanese language might be particularly curious, so some explanation would be in order here.

In my travels, as I often do, I began to pick up a few words in Japan during the 1970s, and the word “ki” (for tree) stuck with me, given that I had been raising Christmas trees in California as a hobby. “Sama” of course is the most formal honorific, referring to someone worthy of great respect. What a great idea to adopt a nickname meaning, “very honorable tree person” – really bad idea !

What I didn’t know at the time was that “ki” has many meanings, including; air, flavor, heart, mind, spirit, humor, and who knows what else, but that was not the problem. Taken together with “sama” in the modern use of the language the two words have a profoundly different meaning. Kisama is a good way of saying anything from “bastard” to “scum”, “pervert”, or worse. Not surprisingly my California vanity license plate, proudly displaying KISAMA drew a fair amount of attention from the many Japanese Americans living in this area.

I lost that license plate some years ago when my favorite Chevy, 4 X 4 pickup was stolen. I suppose it is still motoring around, somewhere in the Mexican desert so I am sure the DMV would not reissue the plates. I suppose that is just as well, but the URL registration is still active so why not put it to “good use”? I use the word “good” advisedly and hope my Japanese and Japanese-American readers will forgive me for my crude abuse of their language.