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Dad had trouble fitting his wedding into his busy hunting schedule. He managed to squeeze it in on November 12, 1960 between duck season and deer hunting. There was no time for a honeymoon though, because he had to shoot Bambi. That was the last year he ever shot a deer. Milo's brother, Joshua, revived the Swanton family tradition of blowing away bark-licking herbivore in 1992. He missed the next few years because he was in the Navy but returned to the killing fields in 1998, then got married with time to spare for a honeymoon to Hawaii.
Although Dad was a dentist, he had a huge sweet tooth. There was always an ample supply of soda pop in the house, and he often gave us kids candy by throwing it at us. His favorite candy was Mallo Cups, which are like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups except they have marshmallow inside them. One day he took a bag of them with him into the marsh to hunt ducks. Sometime that day, his friend's son went looking for him, but how could he find Dad in that thick mass of reeds and cattails? Oh yes, he saw a Mallo Cup wrapper, and another, and then another in a trail leading to Dad.
Dad always spiced his language with colorful metaphors. One day Milo bet his friend that he could swear in front of Dad and not get in trouble. This friend couldn't believe it, because his own father would give him a good whooping for using bad words. Now the two boys were out in the yard when Dad came out of the house, and Milo yelled to him. "Dad! Where's my F@#!*% nerf ball?" Dad, the stern disciplinarian that he was, yelled back, "G@#D*%!! Don't swear!" and disappeared into the garage.
Although Dad was a law-abiding citizen, he always felt proud of himself when he could exploit some loophole in the law to his own advantage. For instance, he would register his vehicles with farm license plates because they were cheaper even though his farm only grew Christmas trees. He had an old Model-A that he rebuilt with a box cabin for running on the ice to go sturgeon fishing. He replaced the front wheels with skis and put tracks on the back so he could register it as a snowmobile, which of course was cheaper than an automobile license.
The Swanton family has floated rafts for years in the Wolf River to fish for walleye. Dad connected his three rafts into a 120-foot long fishing platform and anchored it to the bank with iron poles and concrete pilings. He also floodlit the thing with four banks of lights on telephone poles powered by a generator so he could fish for 24 hours a day. He got some grief from the game warden so he registered this 120-foot raft as a houseboat. The warden didn't think it qualified to be a houseboat, that is until Dad told him he would just put a fishing shack on board and hang a boat motor on the end, and then the warden gave up. Actually, Dad usually didn't antagonize the game warden; he usually made sure he was his pal. He would stop at the warden's house on the way home from duck hunting and leave him a tasty meal. Dad was never much of a butt-kisser, except for the game warden.
Dad loved to sturgeon fish more than anything else. The problem was he could only spear one per year, and he never wanted to use his own tag unless it was the last day of the season. He would buy Mom a tag and have her claim the sturgeon. Eventually, she refused to do that any more but no problem; Dad had sons that were coming of age. "Do you want a sturgeon tag?" he pestered every family member, whether they wanted to fish sturgeon or not, which is why Milo once tagged a sturgeon that weighed twice as much as himself.
The law allowed a fisherman to have up to a two day's limit in his possession. The problem was that Dad would fish for more than a week straight without going home, so he would sometimes have too many fish. So he built a secret compartment inside one of his rafts, laughing the whole time because he was so amused by his own cleverness. The thing was actually a hole in which he could lower a basket of fish into the water to keep them fresh. He built the cover out of an irregular pattern of planks with false nails so the game warden could stand on the raft and not even know it was there.
Dad had to have three boats; one for the Wolf River, one for Lake Winnebago, and one for Lake Michigan. Three garages weren't enough. He had to build a 3200 square-foot corrugated-steel building; call it Garage #4. He had at least five plows; two V-plows and three straight ones. And one dump truck wasn't enough. "Don't tell Mom I bought another dump truck," he told the kids one day, knowing full well that they would tell her so he wouldn't have to.
Yellow. He painted everything this color, except for his bulldozer which already was yellow. He painted his dump truck yellow, his trailors he painted yellow, and he even painted his tools yellow.
The blessed day came on February 4, 1975 when Joshua burst forth into the world after putting Mom through a horrible pregnancy. Dad took Mom to the hospital before dawn, leaving a note to his other two sons, Milo and David: "Took Mom to the hospital. Piss the dog." Dad had an affectionate nickname for the dog. He would tap it on the nose and call it a pisshound.
Dad wasn't supposed to eat ham because he was on a low-salt diet. The problem was that he loved ham and Mom wouldn't let him eat any. Fortunately for Dad, Mom was going to be gone for the better part of a week giving birth to Joshua, and he told his other two sons, "As soon as Mom goes to the hospital, I'm getting a ham." True to his word, he came home with a huge bone of a ham on the night after Joshua was born and this thing filled the entire lower shelf of the refrigerator. It had to be gone before Mom came home, so he ate ham morning, noon, and night, and kept pestering Milo and David, "Have some ham."
Dad wanted to bring Mom and Joshua home from the hospital on Friday, February 7, 1975 because sturgeon fishing started on Saturday and Dad loved to fish sturgeon more than anything in the world. Unfortunately the doctor wouldn't let them come home until the sturgeon fishing opener on Saturday, much to Dad's chagrin.
In the days before floating docks, it was desirable to line the river banks with rock. Dad hauled loads of rock up the river in his aluminum boat. One day, he filled the boat so full of rock that it sunk into the water almost to the gunwale. Still, everything went okay until a fast boat cruised past, creating a wake that swamped Dad's boat and sent it to the bottom like a block of lead. He had to get a winch to recover the boat from the depths of the river.
Dad and his friends used dynamite to dig ditches going out to the marsh, so it would be easier to hunt ducks. One day there was an "accident" resulting in windows rattling in Fremont, over five miles away.
Some lady took Dad to court claiming that his ditches could divert the course of the Wolf River. The case resulted in dump truck after dump truck loads of rock being hauled to the property to "prevent" the Wolf River from changing course.
Dad had a friend who was a freeloader, and one year during spring fishing he wanted to get rid of him so he told his boys to torment the guy until he left. The boys wasted no time in taking advantage of this parental sanction to harass someone. They splashed him by throwing rocks in the river, threw his hat in a tree, and put cigarette butts into his beer. The guy still wouldn't leave.
One lazy summer day Dad went to the Wolf River property where he found some guy fishing from the dock. Normally Dad wouldn't have cared because he did his fishing in the spring, but this guy had the balls to tell Dad to get off his land. Dad calmly took his wallet from his pocket and showed the guy his name written inside. "See this name here?" Then he pointed to his signature on a nearby No Trespassing sign. "See that name there?" The guy got the message and left.
Dad's bulldozer was usually broken and the rest of the time it was stuck. When he got it stuck at home, digging holes in the back yard or grading the boat landing in Lake Winnebago, he would get his farmer buddy to pull it out with a big Case tractor. When he buried it in the mud at the Wolf River, while filling in one of the ditches that could change the course of the river, it had to be dug out by hand. Who was the lucky person who got to help him? Mom!
Dad went to church twice a year, Easter and Christmas, and he liked to rile Mom by wearing white socks with his dress pants. One year she decided not to give him the satisfaction of getting mad, so he pointed them out to her while sitting there in the pew. "Look," he smirked. "White socks."
Dad hardly ever got angry. The only things he yelled at us kids about were throwing rocks into the river and raising ourselves by our belts on the electric chain hoist, but he never did anything about it so we did those things anyway. He tried to punish Milo once, chasing him with a shoe, but he ran away and Dad didn't feel like pursuing the matter.
Dad was always amused by the misfortune of others, especially when they brought it on themselves. One time Milo and David were fighting in the duck skiff in the marsh, and Dad yelled at them to stop. Invariably the skiff overturned, dumping the two boys into the water. Was Dad mad? No, he was howling with laughter from the duck blind.
Nothing was more terrifying to us kids than having to go see Dad for a dental checkup. "I'm ready for you," he would tell us, and rev his dental drill. Zeeee! Zeeee! Then he would laugh whenever he found a cavity. "There's one! Ha! Ha! Ha! I'm going to drill you! There's another one, he, he, he!" He wouldn't give us any novacaine either, because that stuff cost money and he wasn't going to waste any of it on his own kids.
One early morning during spring fishing, Dad's friends were still asleep because they had been drinking the night before. "Look at this," he showed his boys an M-80 with an impish grin on his face. He lit it and tossed it beneath the shack where his buddies were sleeping. BOOM! "@#$%&" We heard them cussing, and Dad howled with laughter.
We had a good time listening to Dad swap stories with his best friend, which were always laced with profanity. The best one was about some guy who was taking a leak while his friend casted for fish. The guy who was fishing flipped his rod back a bit too far and the hook caught his pal in the balls. Dad laughed so hard at this story that he nearly burst a blood vessel in his head.
Our friends were impressed with Dad's vocabulary. One day, when he dropped the fish shanty on his foot, he uttered a curse one friend had never heard before. "C#$% S@&$*!!" This friend went home and asked his father, "Dad, what does C#$% S@&$* mean?" The friend's dad slapped him. "Where did you hear that?" And the son told him that he had heard it from Milo's Dad.
Dad practiced dentistry four days a week, but the rest of the time he worked his butt off. He always had some project; whether it was building something or fixing the bulldozer. Most often he used his welder and acetylene torch to build things from his extensive collection of scrap metal such as fishing pole holders, trailors, sturgeon spears, and a smokehouse. He was always careful too. One time he acquired a fuel tank to convert into a wood-burning furnace for the shop, but first he put a burning rag on a cane pole and stuck in there standing a good distance away to make sure it wouldn't explode when he welded on it.
Dad knew people from Calumet County because they were his patients. That is how he acquired his dump truck, bulldozer, plows, and telephone poles for building rafts. He also collected wood and scrap metal. One time when an old vocational school was getting demolished in Appleton, he kept bugging the foreman until the guy sold him flourescent light fixtures from the building and various other salvagable goodies.
Dad didn't cope with warm weather very well. He would flop on the couch during a hot day, wearing just boxers, then wipe his brow and groan, "What a hot bitch!"
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