Dear friends and family,
Here’s a rambling story dad wrote that explores his awesome sense of wonder and curiosity about just about everything. The story really does ramble . . . I’m not sure if the editor of a newspaper would even think about publishing this article without a major rewrite. But . . . It shows a side of Don Tschirhart that was a huge part of his life; his reason for living . . . Curiosity . . .
I hope you enjoy this bit of prose from ‘Don Tschirhart: The Curious Reporter’. I wonder if he’s still looking for gold . . .
Regards to all,
David T
p.s. Comments are welcome at the end of the story.
“Curiosity Fills My Day”
By Don Tschirhart
Excerpted from the unpublished book “It’s a Wonderful World II: A Retired Reporter Looks At Life“
Curiosity Fills My Day
I have a disease based on the old adage that “curiosity killed the cat.”
Are other readers as curious about ‘things’ as I am? I developed mine over 42 years as a news reporter.
You would think I could shut it off after I retired. Nope! It just got worse.
No matter where I go, no matter what I do, no matter what I see I have to know the answers to the why, what, where, when and how.
A few years ago I was looking for a bird bath. I stopped at the Dutch Mill Inc., near Imlay City. Before I knew it I talked the manager into showing me how the firm manufactured the decorative cement statues and bird baths.
For some years driving on Newark Road toward Lapeer I passed a hill near Five Lakes Road. One day when leaves were mostly off the trees and bushes I saw stone markers. It was a cemetery.
Then my curiosity really got the better of me. Who was buried there?
A county map identified it. Soon after, someone placed a small wooden sign at the side of the hill. It was the Roscoe Cemetery.
Who are the Roscoes? The Lapeer library has little information. It’s obviously the resting place for an old Lapeer family. Every day I pass the cemetery, wave and say a little prayer for the Roscoe family.
There is a home on Newark, West of Lake Pleasant Road where the family plants beautiful flowers in front of a short, white, picket fence. I look forward to my daily drives past it and admire the colorful flowers.
Maybe one of these days I’ll get up enough nerve to stop, walk up to their door and thank them for the pleasure they give passersby.
In 1962 my curiosity wondered about what I believed to be deceptive land sales in the southwest. My editor sent me to Arizona to investigate and I returned with a series of front-page stories.
I was curious about the 15,000 desert acres near Kingman, Arizona that were being sold. In the center of the development I stopped my car, got out and walked a few feet away. I could hear a hymn as the wind whipped around nearby mountains. A map told me they were aptly named the “Music Mountains.”
Recently a friend told me about buying a piece of land near Kingman and said he also had listened to the Music Mountains hymn.
I spent 14 months of my 18-month Army hitch in 1947 and 1948 near Manila in the Philippine Islands where my small pay check limited me to riding buses or jitney and walking.
Curiosity kept me finding new and different places I talked to many shopkeepers to learn about the Japanese occupation and I visited many strange places. Many times I lost myself in Manila and had interesting times finding my way out of the maze.
There was an all-steel church where I attended the 1947 Christmas Midnight Mass; Rizal Sports Stadium where Japanese and American tanks battled it out on the soccer field; a church with a bamboo organ on the road to Cavite; Lake Taal, the cone of an extinct volcano with an island in the center; and, of course, swimming in the shark infested Manila Bay, something I would never do today.
While living near Albuquerque, New Mexico, for 18 months my family profited by my curiosity.
Exploring a very rough dirt road in the Jemez Mountains near the Santo Domingo Pueblo we saw several inverted ice-cream-cone-shaped, sandstone formations upright on a hillside.
I informed the city’s Tribune newspaper editor who wrote a column about Tent Rocks two weeks later.
In that same area there is an extinct volcano that has become the Baca Ranch, named for a relative of Cabeza de Vaca who wandered the southwest after being ship wrecked. He reported his find to the explorer Coronado whose curiosity led him to explore the southwest and discovery of the Grand Canyon. He never found gold.
I’ll spend the rest of my life looking for that different place to visit, that different person to talk with. Hopefully my curiosity will lead me some day to the promised land where I can speak with a lot of interesting people.
