Uncle Ken
Uncle Ken cut my hair until middle school. Every few weeks I’d sit on a kitchen chair with a towel around my shoulders while he worked the scissors and we talked about nothing important. He was my godfather. I share his middle name. Of all the adults who moved through my childhood, Ken Schmidt is the one who handed me the world I live in — and I don’t think either of us knew he was doing it.
He was my mom’s brother. Quiet in the way that certain men from that era were quiet, not withdrawn, just unhurried. He didn’t announce things. He just did them. He made his living as a crown and bridge technician, precision handwork at tooth-scale, essentially sculpture you put in someone’s mouth. He walked to work almost every day. He’d been in the Army Reserves too but he never talked about that. What he talked about, or rather what he did, was everything else. He carved animals out of wood, dogs and birds and horses, and took them to art shows. He played guitar and banjo and was in a bluegrass band that did Civil War reenactments. He loved old war films and Westerns. He watched Austin City Limits on PBS Saturday nights, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, whoever was on that week, the neon Austin skyline glowing behind the performers on that small simple stage. I played with toys on the floor nearby, absorbing the sound of live music without knowing that’s what I was doing.
He was also punny. Relentlessly, groaningly punny, the kind of humor that made the whole room wince and laugh at the same time. My mom said Bob Newhart reminded her of Ken: funny but in a dry deadpan way that snuck up on you. He’d tease Aunt Cathy, called her Cath, with a straight face that made you wonder if he was serious until the corner of his mouth gave it away.
I stayed with Ken and Cathy when my sister was born. I was only two. I remember him helping me use the toilet properly, a small patient act of care that no one else would remember but I do. I think I was the son he never had.
My mom used to tell the story of when they were kids, playing pickup baseball in the neighborhood. Ken was the best player. He wouldn’t play unless they let his sister play too. He was the best, so they let her. That’s the kind of guy he was. The best big brother, my mom said.
I still have 8mm film of him, silent, Kodachrome color, the kind that comes back from processing in a small yellow Kodak box wound on a white plastic reel. I still have the projector too, the clicking of the claw pulling each frame into the gate, the hot white bulb throwing light through dust motes in a dark room. In the footage he’s helping me on a playground slide. The slide is the old kind, tall metal, the kind that burned your legs in summer. He’s patient in a way that doesn’t perform patience, just standing there, hands ready, letting me figure it out. That’s who he was.
Sundays were Uncle Ken’s day. After church, our family would go to his and Aunt Cathy’s house, and the afternoon would unfold into board games. Risk. King Oil, the Milton Bradley one with the raised plastic terrain where you pushed little derricks down into wells and a red peg popped up if you struck. Sinking of the Titanic, where the board itself tilted as the ship went down and you raced your passenger tokens through corridors to the lifeboats before they slid off the deck. My dad and Ken would play a game Ken had made up on paper, something about football with stats and dice and a system only they understood. I knew, even then, that the game was boring for a little kid. But I also knew it was special. A man had made something. He’d invented a game from nothing, written the rules himself, and another man was willing to play it. The act of making it mattered more than whether it was fun. I didn’t have that thought in words at the time, but I felt it — the way you feel the shape of something in the dark before you can see it.
I credit Uncle Ken for my love of board games. Not because his were the best, but because they were his. The handmade thing carried more weight than the store-bought thing, even when the store-bought thing worked better. That’s a lesson I’ve been living out for forty years.
Then there was Star Wars.
I think Uncle Ken brought me to see it. I would have been three or four, too young to remember clearly, and it might have been a re-release rather than the original 1977 run. What I remember is that it existed, that it was enormous, and that Uncle Ken was the one who opened the door.
He gave me the core Kenner action figures, Luke, Han, Leia, Chewie, R2-D2, and Threepio, all part of a set. Three and three-quarter inches tall, five points of articulation, molded plastic accessories that fit in a pocket. I was over the moon. These weren’t random toys accumulated one at a time from birthday parties. This was the cast. The whole story, handed to me at once. I carried those figures everywhere. They lived in the sandbox, on the farm machinery, under the hedges with my dog. They populated every world I built for years.
He also gave me three Star Wars ceramic banks back when the first movie came out, a glossy black Darth Vader helmet heavy and cold to the touch like lacquered obsidian, a gold-painted C-3PO bust with that slightly worried expression, a full-body R2-D2 white and blue and hand-painted so no two were quite the same. Real ceramic, not plastic, the kind of thing that would shatter spectacularly on a hardwood floor. Coin slot in the back, rubber plug on the bottom. I still have them. I treasure them. They sit on a shelf now, doing no banking whatsoever, performing their real function: proof that someone understood what mattered to me before I could articulate it myself.
He brought me to the first Star Trek movie too. And other movies, sometimes the outdoor drive-in theater on the east side of Green Bay where we’d watch double features and I was supposed to fall asleep during the second film but never did. He brought me to Explorers, Enemy Mine, The Last Starfighter, not all in theaters, some on his TV during sleepovers, but the movies we watched together became a shared language. He was the adult who took science fiction and fantasy seriously, who didn’t treat it as kid stuff to be outgrown. That mattered more than I understood at the time.
When I’d spend the night at his house, he’d read me books. Then I’d draw. Sometimes he would sit down and draw with me, not hovering, not teaching, just making marks on paper alongside a child who was making marks on paper. That’s mentorship without a lesson plan. Just presence.
I remember him telling me once when we were out to eat that I ate like a barbarian, because I’d stab the steak with my fork right in the middle and bring the whole thing up to my mouth to take a bite. He said it gently and he said it funny and I never did it again. That was his way of teaching me the things of life, not lectures, not rules, just a well-timed observation delivered with enough humor that you remembered it forever.
During one sleepover we walked to the Fox River, he lived near it. The lower Fox is a broad slow working river, dark water cutting through flat terrain, muddy banks lined with scrubby willows and cattails. We collected deer bones along the bank while he told me stories about Native Americans, the kind of stories an uncle tells a nephew on a riverbank at dusk, half-history and half-imagination. He taught me how to throw cattails like javelins. I remember the weight of them, the satisfying arc, the way they’d stick point-first in the mud if you got the angle right. That walk is one of the clearest memories I have of childhood, the river, the bones, the cattails, and Ken treating me like a person worth spending time with.
Uncle Ken liked birding. He had a bay window overlooking his backyard, and outside it he’d hung bird feeders, several of them, different kinds for different birds. On the table by the window he kept identification books, the field-guide kind with the color plates. He’d sit there and watch and name what came. Songbirds, mostly. I didn’t share the fascination then, but I absorbed the practice: the patience of watching, the pleasure of naming what you see, the quiet attention to small living things. It got into me sideways, the way most of what he gave me did.
Aunt Cathy was my godmother. She cared for me. I felt it, the way children feel things they can’t name. I felt safe with her. She always had food for us. She had an interesting way of showing displeasure if we misbehaved, subtle and coded, a shift in tone so slight you might miss it if you weren’t paying attention. But we were paying attention. We didn’t want to receive it.
She’d been the Green Bay West High School prom queen, a fact she reminded us of once in a while with just enough sparkle to make it clear she was proud and just enough humor to make it clear she knew how it sounded.
She wrote a letter to my mom when Mom first married my dad, encouragement and wisdom, the kind of mentoring letter an older sister-in-law sends a young bride stepping into a new family. I still have it. It tells me something about who Cathy was: the person who showed up with words when words were needed.
Their house was the gathering place. Get-togethers with Cathy’s side of the family were a regular thing: her mother Irene Thorp, her sister Debbie and Debbie’s husband Al Gulickson. Irene was another one of those characters who populated my childhood and shaped my sense of the world. She was a formidable woman, built like she’d been designed to withstand Wisconsin winters and anybody’s nonsense, and she had opinions about both. Cathy, Debbie, and Irene together were a force of nature: three stout, expressive women who talked over each other and finished each other’s sentences and filled a kitchen with noise and warmth and the absolute certainty that everything was going to be handled, whether you liked how they handled it or not.
During those gatherings, Uncle Ken would pull the grill out in front of their single-stall garage and hold court. He was a master griller in the way someone in the ’70s was a master griller, apron on, water bottle at the ready to squelch down flare-ups, squeezing the grease out of hamburgers with the back of the spatula until they were flat and well-done and perfect by the standards of the era. The men would hang out by the grill. The women prepared the beans and potato salad inside. We kids played in the yard, a long narrow strip bordered by chain-link fence with Ken and Cathy’s garden along one side that we had to be careful not to hit with the kickball. There’d be a game of jarts or kickball, maybe both, the jarts were the real ones, steel-tipped with bright plastic fins, the kind you lobbed in a high arc and they came down point-first into the lawn. They banned them a few years later. Nobody thought twice about it then. I felt much older than my cousins, Kim and Carrie, and the Gulicksons’ son Chad, so we never really played played, more coexisted in the same rectangle of grass while the adults talked and the grill smoked and the afternoon stretched out the way summer afternoons do when you’re nine and time hasn’t learned to move fast yet.
They had a cottage up north too. We went a few times. One visit it was infested with ants, I remember them crawling on everything, the kitchen counter alive with them. I learned early that cottages “up north” in Wisconsin were mostly an obligation to mow someone else’s lawn every weekend in the summer. Everyone in Green Bay seemed to have one.
Ken was a performer, though he wouldn’t have used that word. His bluegrass band played Civil War reenactments and Threshing Days both. For the reenactments he didn’t dress up in a uniform, just wore a nice polyester shirt and played in the gazebo on the retro town square while the troops did their thing in the fields. I’d walk around and talk to the soldiers, each one pretending to hate the other side with theatrical conviction. For a kid it was confusing and thrilling, adults playing make-believe with real costumes and real commitment. I didn’t connect it then to what I was doing with action figures and cardboard boxes. It was the same impulse. Adults just had better props.
The Threshing Days deepened my love for old farm machinery. They’d bring out the antique threshers and run them, massive barn-red separators powered by flat belts running from the flywheel of a steam engine. Men in overalls pitched sheaves into the feeder with pitchforks. Grain poured out one end; straw blew out the other into a growing stack. Chaff floated in the air, caught the light, got in your collar. The steam engines hissed and chuffed on steel wheels. Still functional, still dangerous, still beautiful in the way that purposeful engineering is always beautiful. We didn’t have one of that scale on our farm. Ours was smaller, older, wooden, horse-era equipment converted for tractor use. But seeing the big ones at the threshing events gave me context for what we had. The old machinery wasn’t junk. It was history, still working.
He encouraged my drawing, but not in the way a teacher encourages, more in the way a fellow traveler nods at you on the trail. He made things. I made things. That was the bond, and we never had to name it.
My parents once thought about buying a house on Uncle Ken’s street. I remember standing on the porch of the house they were considering, looking at the neighborhood, the sidewalks, the other houses, the tidiness of it, and thinking I would not want to leave the farm. I think since we spent so much time with the Schmidts, my parents figured we might as well move closer. It made practical sense. But I was a farm kid, and the farm was the world, and I couldn’t imagine trading the hedges and the sandbox and the barn for a porch on a street, even if Uncle Ken was just down the block.
They came to visit us on the farm too, often. There would be hoedowns — Ken and my mom and Bucky playing music on the back of the hay wagon, sitting on hay bales, the yard full of people and the sound carrying out across the fields. Those are some of the most complete images I have of childhood: the music, the hay, the people, the light going gold over the farm while somebody played banjo and somebody else clapped along and the kids ran circles in the grass until they couldn’t run anymore.
My mom died, and it devastated him. He was never the same after that. She was his sister — the one he wouldn’t play baseball without — and whatever tether held the family constellation together ran through her. When she was gone, things drifted in ways none of us could have predicted. Ken lost something that didn’t come back.
It wasn’t the same visiting them after that, but we tried to keep it up. In my early twenties, I started going over again, and he taught me guitar. Patient as ever. The same hands that had spotted me on the playground slide now showing me chord shapes on a neck. We talked about Star Wars: Episode I, which was coming. He was excited. I was excited. It was the last big thing we shared before the drift set in.
We lost touch after that. I don’t remember how it happened — no fight, no falling out. Just the way it goes when a young man stops going to his uncle’s house and the Sundays fill up with other things. The distance that accumulates in small increments until one day you realize you haven’t called in a year, then two, then you stop counting.
He died on March 28, 2021.
I think about what he gave me. Not the action figures, though I still have the ceramic banks on a shelf. Not the board games, though I still play them. What he gave me was the model. A man who carved things, played music, made up games on paper, took a kid to the movies, threw cattails like javelins by the Fox River, and sat down to draw alongside a child without making it a lesson. A man who wouldn’t play unless they let his sister play too. He showed me what a creative life looked like before I knew that’s what it was called. He didn’t talk about art or meaning or vocation. He just made things, quietly, and let me watch. People tell me I have his profile.
I still have the 8mm reel — that silent footage of a tall man helping a small boy up a slide that seemed to reach the sky. I still have the projector. If I threaded the film and turned it on, the room would go dark, and the clicking would start, and the warm Kodachrome colors would flicker against the wall — slightly shaky, slightly dreamy at eighteen frames per second — and there he’d be. Patient. Hands ready. Waiting for me to figure it out.
Every time I make something with my hands, he’s standing at the bottom.