Shore Leave In Naples

Hello everyone.  Praise the Lord!

I was up in Wisconsin visiting family,  from my mother's side of the family. She was born and raised in Central Wisconsin, In a little town called Wautoma. We stayed with my Aunt and Uncle Jerry and Nancy Mankowski, who are still living on the old dairy farm.

One afternoon on the kitchen table Jerry is telling stories about his Navy days. He served for the USS Wadleigh in the fifties. The Wadleigh was a small destroyer. Jerry told us a story about when he got shore leave in Naples, Italy.

This was not long after World War II and all the devastation that entailed! Jerry in a couple of friends with the town in Naples. They got a hotel room for three days and two nights for only ten dollars! It was a very nice hotel. But after World War II, not a lot of tourists were going to Italy because of the war devastation.

Jerry and his friends partied in the town and had a nice supper that evening. They said the meat and their food tasted kind of strange. After the shore leave was over, They started talking with some of the guys on the ship. They said a lot of restaurants in Italy are still using dog and rat meat in their food. 

Jerry and his friends did not understand how poor the Italians were after World War II. In order to get by they would use marginal meats and just not tell anybody about it. The mayonnaise would make no mention of what type of meat it actually was! But that's okay It didn't kill him!

William James Roop

 Roop-Crappell Ministries 

 Hospice Volunteer Stories 

 The Trucking Tango 

 Apostolic Theological Seminary 

Drew's Meeting With God

Hello everyone. Praise the Lord!

I was offloading my one and only load for the day, at Goodman Manufacturing. I deliver to them all of their Freon, that they use for the factory for the manufacturing of their air conditioners.

Drew and I were talking, well mostly Drew was talking. Drew is a middle ages white guy who is about anti-government as they come! They told me a story about his encounter with God. This happened years ago when he was twenty-seven years old, he is about fifty today. 

He testified to me, "I got up early in the morning my wife was still asleep, so I got up and made coffee, and went out into the garage. That's when I heard the voice of God. It was a very soothing voice, but at the same time, very authoritative."

He started talking to Drew and Carrie not a conversation. At this time Drew was a very conservative Christian. So he was wanting to discern the spirit. So he said that this is a false spirit! "I rebuke it in the name of Jesus Christ," he proclaimed!

The voice said, "I cannot rebuke myself." So Drew was convinced this was the voice of God! This voice told him that he would be a teacher later in life. Drew said this was his first and only supernatural experience with God.

William James Roop

Roop-Crappell Ministries

Hospice Care and Dying

The Trucking Tango

Apostolic Theological Seminary

Booze Under The Rumble Seat

Hello everyone.  Praise the Lord!

The great things about visiting relatives is that you can ask them questions about your family history. And you can hear the stories that your parents didn't want to tell you!  That's the good stuff!

My Uncle Jerry is at the kitchen table where he tells the stories. He told me about my grandfather, and now he ran moonshine for Al Capone crime family in Chicago during the wild thirties.

My grandfather had a Pontiac coupe with rumble seats in the back. Underneath the rumble seats was a large empty area. You couldn't see what was under the rumble seat when the rumble seat was closed. That made a great hiding place for booze!

So my grandfather would drive from South Chicago, to a coffee shop somewhere in North Chicago, where he would park across the street, and park his car in the direction that he was wanting to go, which would be south. That told the mobsters that they needed to load full bottles of booze to go south

My grandfather would sip coffee coffee shop until the manager would come out and nod his head. That meant that he was ready to go. So my grandfather would leave the coffee shop, get into his car, and head south to South Chicago where he would stop at another coffee shop.

At this coffee shop he would park across the street pointing north, telling them that he had full booze to be unloaded, and needed to be reloaded with empty bottles. After he was done for the night he grabbed two or three hours sleep and go to his daytime job shoveling loose asbestos! No mask, no breathing air, no nothing back in those days.

My grandfather was paid five dollars a trip by the Capone crime family. That made ten dollars a night total. Making ten dollars a night during the Great Depression in the thirties was a lot of money! That was back in the days when people would try to sell an apple for a nickel! So if you were making ten dollars a night, you are making good money!

When Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion by the Untouchables, and put in prison, my grandfather decided it was time to get out of town. So my grandparents bought a dairy farm in Central Wisconsin, and settled down as a country farmers. He farmed  for the rest of his life, and we were sitting in the kitchen table in the old family farmhouse.

William James Roop

Roop-Crappell Ministries

Hospice Care and Dying

The Trucking Tango

Apostolic Theological Seminary

Swimming In The Mediterranean

Hello everyone.  Praise the Lord!

I was up in Wisconsin with my wife and mother, visiting my mother's family, who still lives up there. We were staying with my Aunt and Uncle, Jerry and Nancy Mankowski, who are still living in the old farmhouse.

One afternoon we are sitting around the kitchen table telling stories. Jerry was telling about his old Navy days back in the fifties.  He served on the destroyer USS Wadleigh, DD 689. Wild board that ship they went on a Mediterranean cruise.

They stopped in many ports throughout the Mediterranean when they were there. One of the places they went was off the coast of Israel and Lebanon. Country of Lebanon was having political issues. The USS Wadleigh was assigned to cruise, very slowly, at only five knots an hour, up and down the coast of Lebanon and Israel.

Those two countries are very small so going very slow is not a problem. While they're sailing up the coast, the captain ordered crew swimming! That means the crew can take turns jumping into the sea for a swim. Times of cruise swimming was very popular among the crew. It was also very rare for that captain to give that order. 

Uncle Jerry has a lot of stories from his Navy days, it seems it was a good memory for him. I can understand that I spent four years in the United States Air Force in the eighties, and I have lots of good memories from those days as well.

William James Roop

 Roop-Crappell Ministries 

 Hospice Volunteer Stories 

 The Trucking Tango 

 Apostolic Theological Seminary 

Cooning Melons

Hello everyone.  Praise the Lord!

I had flown up to Wisconsin with my mother, and wife, to visit my mother's brother, my Uncle Jerry and Aunt Nancy.. We did a lot sitting around and talking the whole week. Life there is very slow!

One afternoon we were all around the kitchen table telling stories. Jerry was telling most of the stories since he's a good storyteller. Both Jerry and my mother both told a story of them cooning melons from the neighbor.

The neighbor across the lake reported my grandfather had a gun that he not was allowed to have. The sheriff came by the farm and confiscated the gun. Ever since then my grandfather and this neighbor across the lake was on bad terms.

So two of his kids, my uncle Jerry and my mother Bernadine, both teenagers at the time, decided to coon some of his melons. That neighbor had twenty acres of watermelons, just on their saw the lake from the family farm.

So that summer they would go by rowboat across the lake and coon some watermelons. Cooning is going at night, and to the fields, and stealing fruits of a farmers crop. In this case it was watermelon.

They would row in the rowboat across the lake, take some melons, and as they rowed back across the lake, they ate the melons and threw the remains in the lake. So they had the fun of stealing the melons, eating the melons, and then getting rid of the evidence down to the bottom of the lake.

Sounds kind of bad, but those are just country kids having a good time. The twenty acres of melons produced thousands of watermelons, and a handful didn't make any difference. But I imagine it was lots of fun rowing across the lake at night.

Have you ever cooned watermelons or anything else? Can you tell him us about it in the comments section? If you enjoyed this story, you can click on the "follow" button at the top of the page to catch all future stories.

William James Roop

Roop-Crappell Ministries

Hospice Care and Dying

The Trucking Tango

Apostolic Theological Seminary

They Are Always Looking Up

Hello everyone. Praise the Lord!

My mother, my wife, and I flew  to Wisconsin, to spend a week with my Uncle Jerry and Aunt Nancy. They live in small town called Wautoma, in Central Wisconsin. They live on the old family farmhouse.

We were all sitting around the kitchen table and Jerry was talking about ice fishing. Ice fishing is a very big activity here in Wisconsin.

Because of ice fishing rules in Wisconsin is no more than three holes and one pole per hole. Well you have one hole in three poles. They guys around there always cut out three holes with one pole and one tip-up per pole. So one fisherman can only have three tip-ups at a time.

They told us that the game warden can drive the top of the hill, and from his car with his binoculars, look to see how many tip-ups you may have. If you have too many tip-ups, you'll get a big fine!

He told us they us live fish on the hooks, and let them flop around. He said the big northerns pikes that they like to catch, just sit at the bottom of lake and look up all the time. They're always looking up. Because that's where the sick fish go. When fish that are sick, they swim to the top of the lake to get more oxygen. Those big northerns will swim up and eat them!

So they put their bait in the water connected to a tip-up. When the fish swims up take the bait, the tip up will be pulled up. When you see your tip-up go from laying down, to straight up, you know you have a fish at the end.

You then walk over to the hole, grab the tip-up, and then hook the fish really good. Very slowly, pull on the line, and pull the fish up out of the water, and up through the hole. Then you're free to save the fish, or eat it on the spot.

Fisherman in Wisconsin have these little wooden shacks that are heated, have TVs, and radios, and they pull them on the ice. So while they're waiting for a tip-up, they can hang-out comfort. They have portable stoves for heating or cooking their freshly caught fish.

Have you ever been ice fishing? Can you tell us about it in the comment section? If you like these stories, and want to catch on again you can click on the follow button I could talk with the page.

William James Roop

 Roop-Crappell Ministries 

 Hospice Care and Dying 

 The Trucking Tango 

 Apostolic Theological Seminary 

Signs All Around

Hello everyone.  Praise the Lord!

I was up in Central Wisconsin this summer visiting family and friends. I was with my mother and my wife. My mother was born and raised there and still has lots of family there.

We stayed with my Aunt and Uncle, Nancy and Jerry Mankowski. One day I was walking down to the old milk house with Jerry. We were going down to his windmill to drink some water. When he started telling me about his predictions for winter.

You said the berry bushes were full of berries. He said the bushes are all berries late in the summer, he'll know we'll have a cold winter this year.  You sit at the squirrels and muskrats are busy and late summer That's also a sign of a cold winter coming up.

Jerry also showed me the ants on the ground. He said look at the ends how they're building around the wall around their nest hole.  He said when the ants do that you can expect lots of rain coming up soon. He said that they are preparing for it now.

Jerry said you just have to look around and you can see the signs of coming rain or of a coming hard cold winter. He said the signs are all around you just have to keep your eyes open to it. Tell me the Indians did that for hundreds of years, the signs are there for us as well.

William James Roop

 Roop-Crappell Ministries 

 Hospice Volunteer Stories 

 The Trucking Tango 

 Apostolic Theological Seminary