Life settled down a lot for Mike McMahon and Kirsten Langenderfer after Henry was born in 1981. Mike dropped coaching volleyball the year Henry was born, mostly because it gave him the chance to be with Kirsten and the kids more. With a junior reporter and a sports reporter now on the staff, there were weeks that went by in which he even approached working only forty hours. There weren’t many of them, but there were a few, and most of the extra hours came in the evenings.
Mike and Kirsten slowly fell into a routine that suited them. For example, they both got up about the same time, and shared making breakfast for themselves and the kids – it took some time while Henry was still being spoon-fed, and as Mike was no longer doing sports reporting, he quit going to the breakfast table at Rick’s Café. He didn’t consider it much of a loss; he was of the opinion that the only things the guys at Rick’s talked about were hunting, golf, and football. Mike didn’t have any interest in hunting, was a lousy golfer, and got enough football in the fall to suit him, anyway.
But after Henry got old enough to assist in feeding himself, with some help from Tiffany, who was now getting old enough to be some help, the routine changed a little. Mike could get in and out of the bathroom in the morning in five minutes flat while breakfast was making, but Kirsten faced a half hour or more of getting her face on and getting dressed. In time, Mike got tired of waiting around, so they juggled their schedules a bit. Most mornings he dropped Tiffany off at school and Henry off at Kirsten’s parents’ house on the way out to the Spearfish Lake Café, out near the state road and the crossing of Central Avenue by the railroad tracks.
Sitting around the big breakfast table for a cup of coffee and the morning gossip at the Spearfish Lake Café was actually partly business for Mike – it gave him a chance to test the tenor of the community, and hear what people were really thinking about. He found out more reactions to each issue of the paper and each major story there than he ever could have found out at the office. Webb had been a regular at Rick’s Café for maybe twenty years, but he was just as glad that Mike switched; they often compared notes afterwards.
Mike didn’t mind – the crowd at the Spearfish Lake Café was younger than the crowd at Rick’s, and their conversation was more eclectic. They did talk hunting and football, of course, but also rock and roll, pickup trucks, television, sex, basketball, snowmobiles, fishing, sex, guns, country music, politics, cars, women, baseball, and, of course, sex. In addition, most of the members of the Toivo Expedition had gravitated out there on at least a part-time basis – even Ellsberg, and that was something considering Rick’s was only a block or so from the railroad office, where the Café was a mile or more away. But, with the tracks right next to the restaurant, it was often used as a lunch stop or a crew change point for the rail crews, so that had something to do with it. The Toivo Expedition was something Mike tried to keep up on, partly for personal reasons, of course, but partly because it was an ongoing story that would obviously be a big story if it ever came off.
Mike had first met Mark Gravengood at the breakfast table at Rick’s. In fact, it had been there, coming up on ten years before, that he’d related to the table the story of watching as Kirsten and Henry Toivo found love in the family sauna and the river outside, back before Mike had started going with Kirsten. They hadn’t gotten particularly close in the first years, but as time went on the Compugraphics at the Record-Herald had gotten older and more cranky. One morning along about 1980, Mike had wondered if Mark with his technical skills might be able to tickle one of them back into working order. Bringing in a repairman from outside was Godawful expensive, usually for some simple fix that was right in the manual if the generally non-technical people at the paper could have figured out what it said.
Mark could, and did. He never became an expert at fixing the machines, but he could usually run diagnostic tests and get a hunch which of perhaps five hundred IC chips had blown its zap and could make sense of how to fix it. If it got really complicated they still had to call someone in from outside.
One morning in the spring of 1986, Mike had an extra mission, if a usual one. Mark could sometimes be hard to catch up with, but there was a good chance he could be caught at the breakfast table before he headed out to the phone company. He was there this morning, and Mike passed along the message: “Can you drop by sometime? Number Two has blown its cookies again.”
“It’s not going to be this morning,” Mark told him. “Got a problem with the lines out in Amboy Township.”
“Well, when you can, in the evening, if you have to. We really don’t need the machine till the first of the week, but we’ll need it bad, then.”
Then, Mark said something surprising: “You know, you ought to be thinking about getting rid of those things. They’re a pain in the butt to use, they’re hard to fix and getting harder, and there’s getting to be better stuff out there cheaper.”
“We’ve thought about it,” Mike said. “We experimented with an Apple II to run one of them for a while, but it was slower than just running them directly. In fact, I’ve got the computer at home, just to play with.”
“That was pretty obsolete to begin with,” Mark commented; he’d seen the lashup work, as much as it could be said to work at all. “There’s getting to be lots better stuff out there. Apple’s got a thing they call a laserprinter, that lets you output camera ready copy on plain paper. With what Compugraphic photo paper costs you, that’d be a huge savings right there. It runs off one of these Macintoshes they’ve come out with. Neat rig, but a little on the expensive side. There might be cheaper ways to do it with IBM stuff.”
“We gotta look into that,” Mike told him. “Sooner or later, one of those blue beasts is going to gutshoot itself, and it’d cost, oh, hell, eight to ten thousand to replace.”
“Might cost you that much to do it with Macs,” Mark told him. “But there’s a new IBM that’s coming out, the 286, that’ll do just about what a Mac will for a heck of a lot less money. Let me look around and see what’s available.”
Mike and Mark got to know each other a little better over the next few months, as they traveled around to some other papers that were experimenting with personal computers for production, and they spent some time exploring software and machinery.
It was actually the slow period in early 1987 before a few desert tan boxes and monitors replaced the old blue beasts that Mike had lived with for over ten years. In the beginning, there were three of them, one for Carrie, one for Mike and the reporters to share, and one for ad makeup, all running an early version of PageMaker, and printing out on a single Hewlett-Packard Laserjet. It was supposed to be experimental, and phased in, but after the first morning no one wanted to switch on a Compugraphic again, and, in fact, after the first week or so, no one did. The reporters did gripe a lot about having to share one machine, so they soon added on two more 286s and a second laserprinter. There was no network at that point, and wouldn’t be for some years to come, but there were a bunch of floppy disks that tended to float around the office between machines.
It took a while to make sense out of everything. This was still pretty much back in the DOS era, and Mark had to tickle each machine to get it to work with the others, but soon, with the click of a mouse, they were doing things they’d never dreamed of doing, let alone attempted, a few weeks before.
Kirsten was pregnant again by this time, and it was as unplanned as Tiffany had been, but traditional in a sort of way. Mike and Kirsten had left the kids with her parents and had driven down to Camden for an adult dinner and a movie that wasn’t “G” rated, and on the way back they somehow got to talking about making out in the back seat. Kirsten had done a fair share of it, but Mike admitted he’d never done it in a back seat, so grinning like a couple kids, they’d driven right out to Turtle Hill, the traditional local makeout spot, and got it on. As near as they could figure out later, that was when it happened.
Kirsten wasn’t a kid anymore; she was 35 and would be 36 when the baby was born. But, while they were happy to have another one on the way, it was obviously going to cause some problems. They’d lived in Aunt Gretchen’s old house for ten years now. When they’d moved in, with Tiffany on the way, it had seemed large and spacious after Mike’s tiny apartment, but now, with two kids, it seemed no less cramped than the apartment had been. Tiffany had to share a room with Henry, and that was a problem that would only get worse since Tiffany was a neatnik, and Henry, now six, was clearly a born slob. They still had to juggle cars around in the single-car-wide driveway almost every time they wanted to go anywhere; the air horns on the C&SL trains could knock them out of bed at any time, day or night, and there were a lot more trains than there had been a few years before, at least in the summer when the windows were often open. To top it off, Mike had been hearing rumors of the city planning a special assessment district for sewer work that could perhaps add ten thousand dollars to their taxes over the next ten years. It was time to be moving on, and he knew it.
But, Kirsten dragged her feet. She really didn’t want to move; after all, she’d grown up there, at least in her early years. More important, since she and Mike still weren’t married, their joint ownership of the house had come to signify something like a marriage agreement to her.
Then, one morning along in April, a snake had come crawling out of the bathtub drain. Kirsten was deathly afraid of anything resembling a snake, so killed it with a hair dryer, then drove down to the office and announced to Mike that the time had come to find a new house, preferably one with a snakeproof septic tank.
Mike had been with Kirsten long enough by this time to know to strike when the iron was hot: he was on the phone to Binky Augsberg within minutes, and they were looking at a new house by noon. Binky had a pretty good feel for her customers, and could tell if the deal were going to fly, ‘twere best done quickly.
Binky didn’t need a listing book to tell what properties were available – she had it pretty much in her head, and it took her only seconds to come up with a list of possibles. The first one on the list was about four miles out of town, half a mile off the state road on a side road, County Road 427. It was a jewel – a four-bedroom ranch built into the side of a hill, with a three-car garage and a full basement. Best of all, as far as Kirsten was concerned, it had a septic tank.
There was a downside, and Binky told them up front: it was a dead end road, so it wasn’t high on the priority list for being plowed out after a snowfall, and the county wasn’t very good about keeping the gravel graded, The road got very potholed at times, and the locals sometimes called it “Busted Axle Road.” “On the other hand, if you have small kids, that’s not all bad,” Binky said. “People don’t go flying by, and that also keeps the dust down.”
It was a pretty good deal for the price and they didn’t bother to look farther, once Binky had agreed to buy their old house as a speculation, which is how she made her real money in real estate.
It wasn’t until after they’d signed the purchase offer that Mike realized their next door neighbors, two or three hundred yards away, were going to be Mark and Jackie Gravengood.