1974
THE SCHLAVER CHRISTMAS CHIMES
December 25, 1974
C.O. reaches this busy Yule season with this annual letter unfinished ... long lines at the postoffice and Christmas presents yet to buy. But that's normal. So, after a rather uneventful year and little news to report he will dip into the past a bit with material from writings of other years. In the year ahead he will continue as executive director of the Mt. Prospect Chamber of Commerce and Betty will continue working as assistant cashier at the First National Bank of Mount Prospect. There will be more rounds of golf for C.O., he hopes, and lawn work to do, a garden to care for and household tasks and flowers to keep both Betty and he occupied in non-retirement.
A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL
THE YEAR OF 1974
The No. 1 event in the Schlaver family was the arrival of our third grandson, born to Mark-Marcia Steffens of Park Ridge. Clay Robert joins cheerful and independent Matthew Boyd in lineage along with No. 2 grandson Benjamin Andrew, the son of Paul & Diana. We had opportunity to see Paul and family in October by traveling to Chapel Hill, N.C. but they'll be away from the family circle this Christmas as they journey to find a new home in Missouri... David, a busy rector, director and campus priest at Notre Dame, will be with us, we hope. Great grandmother Cronau will be here, too, beside the fireplace and perhaps crocheting another cover for kinfolk.
We call it Christmas because it denotes the birth of Him who was called Prince of Peace. He, too, found troubled times which are akin to those today when our nation carries the cross of Watergate and a recession... Yes, Christ was born while his parents were on a tax-paying pilgrimage in the midst of a housing shortage. There was no room at the inn. His people were then burdened and oppressed. He was later to be ridiculed, betrayed, persecuted and crucified. Yet today He speaks to millions who call Him Saviour. Yes, He is a known quantity. The very custom of giving Christmas gifts rose from the fact that Christ was the great gift to the world. ...Until one feels the real spirit of Christmas, there is no Christmas. All else is outward display--so much tinsel. ...Realism is the warmth that comes to the hearts of men as the Christmas spirit returns.
Betty and C.O.
MEMORIES (Once We Wrote:)
Our first auto, the Model T Ford... "It was not a hot rod, but what a beauty it was back in 1920 ... the machine that freed the boy from the country. The motor caught life on the turn of a crank and it chugged a song of roads to conquer, of the hills to climb, of trips to make beyond boundaries of the Sparta, Wis. farm."
The Coulee Country
...The Mindora Cut, the Great Stone Face of the coulee country, dominates the whole maze of limestone-capped ridges and accompanying valleys. Through this gash in the backbone of the coulee domain a road winds lazily... This is coulee country that Hamlin Garland, the prose writer of the prairies knew intimately and he wrote epics of the lives of those who toiled unceasingly to hew farms out of the raw clay soil and the ridge timber.