My parents lived in Antigo for a number of years. My father, Darwin Hintz,  lived out on a farm and my mother was worked as   with the agricultural extension office. She was a secretary. They didn’t have very much money when they first started out. He worked hard. One time my father went to Des Plaines, Illinois and worked during the war in the factory that produced airplanes and that sort of thing. He was very interested in airplanes. He  had a flying license.

After that they moved back to Antigo and he became interested in land surveying and went to school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Then he got his job in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He worked for Foth & Porath, a land surveying company, which is where we lived all of my time. And now it’s called Forth & Van Dyke. A few years back after my mother died and she was cremated and we took her ashes back to Wisconsin my Dad went to visit the old company.  This company was…you know, had difficulty times in their early years in the business many times they could hardly pay their bills.  Also, my Dad wasn’t always paid on time because they didn’t have the money.  His pay check were late many months, but they were frugal and managed. 

But this company has gotten very large in the state of Wisconsin now. It’s a huge land surveying company and I always feel very honored that my father was probably one of the basic people who helped to keep it going and could see far beyond the time.

He was ahead of his time in land surveying. On Saturdays, I would work for my Dad as a pole girl, when he did some private jobs.They had to do all these numbers   He figured out to keep his people busy he needed to put these numbers into the computer. He proceeded to buy a computer, which was as big as a furnace, in those days and had cards that were used to make it work and he put it in our basement.  He would put his numbers for his jobs into the computer every night and be ready for the crews in the morning. To this day my cousins marveled at how far ahead of his times he was. When he was moving to Ohio he couldn’t sell the house because of this huge computer.

It was a Hewlett Packard I believe, my father also would fly somebody from Detroit, Michigan over to Green Bay, Wisconsin to fix the computer periodically, and of course now in today’s world they have laptops and little squares and everything, so…when they couldn’t sell the house to move to Ohio. My Dad tried to give the computer away to the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay school of engineering and they weren’t interested. He spent a great deal of time working on trying to get the computer out of the basement of the house, but no one was interested. 

He decided he’d just take the computer apart and sell it for scrap iron. So that’s what he did. That’s the kind of fellow he was. He made the best of what the situation was and if he didn’t know how to do it, he learned how to do it. He was a pioneer in the use of computers.

Today, he’s 93 years old and going to be 94 in March,  he still has a computer. Dad plays cards on the computer daily and he  has e-mail, which he enjoys using.  Many times he  does his problem solving from The Wisconsin Land Surveyors  bi- monthly bulletin? He works  out the problem and  then send his  answers back to them by e-mail.  Dad has been written up in the bulletin a number of times.  He is a life member of the Wisconsin Land Surveyors and is very proud of it.

I remember one time the editor wrote him a note and said, “Darwin, you were just two shy days from being the first person to respond to the problem solving problem,” but he’s gotten his name in that magazine a number of times now, so his mental capacity for doing things is very sharp for his age…He’s very good at thinking things through.

Mom Was an Influence on Me in School and Profession

My mom was a secretary and she was in the food service and I think that’s why I became more interested in doing that. She also worked in flowers at what’s called “Schoeder’s Greenhouse” when we lived on Hastings Street. Which is a big greenhouse in Wisconsin in Green Bay, and she then became involved in the food service and that was very interesting. So, she became a cook and she always liked foods and that sort of thing, and then we had in our first house – we had an apartment and the lady above was the extension agent.

Her name was Bertha Schoonover. I don’t know what year that was now anymore, but I think she had an influence on my mother. My mother was very good at her food culinary skills. Just a few weeks ago my dad wanted to make kloschies.

A kloschy is a pastry which is really more of a sweet dough – a yeast sweet dough- that you let rise and then you divide it into balls and then you make a little impression in the center of the balls and then you fill them with poppy seed or with jams or jellies or something. So, I didn’t want to be the one to make these doughs each evening so I just bought Road’s frozen dinner rolls and left them.

So, on New Year’s Day when I had Daddy over I said, “Hey, before we eat dinner you have to make these kloschies,” so he did! He would take this little glass, put in sugar and twist it around and then he filled them with the poppy seed filling that we had.

So, and just the other day I brought him some more and I said, “These aren’t very good and I don’t know why,” and he said, “Well you know, you over-cooked them, that’s what you did, Jean! You baked them too long!” I said, “Oh, I thought they looked like they should be that way?” “No, no, no.” But he also, instead of just putting butter over the top if it after it’s been baked – it’s like a pastry – he’s like, “Just use spray,” you know the butter spray you can get today?