Jon Nels Olson

 Jon Nels Olson

1958 - 2022

Jon Nels Olson, age 63, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin passed away on May 19th 2022 from complications of Myotonic Dystrophy (MD) following a fall from his bicycle on April 26th.

He was preceded in death by his parents, Nels and Mary Olson, and is survived by wife Julia (always Julie to Jon) Vosper, daughter Ahna, son Ezra, sisters Lydie Raschka (Chris), Siri Olson (Jonathan Strom), Kari Olson (Charles Tien), brother-in-law James Vosper (Mary), and nieces, Maya Raschka, Solveig Olson-Strom, Madeline Tien, Kaia Tien, Sarah Vosper, nephew Jacob Vosper (Brittney) and grandniece and nephew Eloise and Atticus. .



Jon was born on July 7, 1958 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He attended St. Olaf College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in mathematics. Jon and Julia met in college and they married in 1985.



Though he majored in mathematics, in college Jon also discovered a love of writing that led him to a rewarding, varied career as a journalist and author. He began as the editor of the Middleton Times-Tribune, then worked as a reporter and associate editor for The Business Journal, and produced the television show Business of Wisconsin. From 1991 to 1995 he worked as a business reporter for the Milwaukee Journal and then from 1995 to 2009 worked for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as a meticulous copy editor. Jon also wrote freelance feature articles for the Ann Arbor Observer, Discover magazine and other publications. For an article on the Mackinac Bridge, he conquered his fear of heights and rode the capsule elevator in one of the bridge's towers, and then climbed 40 feet up a narrow ladder to emerge through a hatch at the top overlooking the Straits of Mackinac. He also had publications in The Antioch Review, and wrote two novels, The Petoskey Stone and The Ride Home. Jon kept daily journals throughout his life and later wrote a blog, Just a Little Bit Cranky. Jon's best forum for expressing his wry sense of humor was his eagerly anticipated annual Christmas letter.



Jon had a passion for biking. After graduating from Pioneer High School, Jon and two friends rode bikes from Seattle to San Diego, over 1,300 miles. Subsequently Jon took many long-distance rides around the Midwest. His lifelong dream was to bike across the country. Despite having been diagnosed with MD, he trained hard, planned extensively, and decided, in 2019, to ride from Astoria, Oregon to Astoria, Queens, New York, raising funds for The Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA). He got as far as Michigan when he was hit by a car and hospitalized, ending his trip. Remarkably, he was back up on his bike within a year. Jon remains one of the largest individual fundraisers for the MDA.



Jon was devoted to his writing group of which he was a member for over twenty years. From the words of one long time member: "I feel so privileged to have known [Jon] for so long and, in a way, so well – in the way that you know someone when you share your roughest rough drafts with them, when you trust them to tell you the truth and be critical and insightful and kind, which Jon was, unfailingly."



Toward the end of his life, Jon expressed deep contentment from simple pleasures such as daily writing, frequent bike rides, long walks, listening to podcasts, and watching the Brewers and the Bucks with his beloved Julie.



April 26th 2022 was Jon's last day outdoors; he was riding his bike.



A funeral service will be held on Saturday June 25th at Immanuel Presbyterian Church 1100 N. Astor Street, Milwaukee WI at 11:00AM and a livestream link for the service will be posted on the Heritage Funeral Homes tribute page. 

In lieu of flowers, donations in Jon's memory may be made to The Muscular Dystrophy AssociationBit.ly/Ride4MDA or to Immanuel Presbyterian Church https://www.immanuelwi.org/contributewhere Jon had been a member since 1988 and was ordained as a Deacon and Elde

MEMORIAL EVENTS

JUN

25

Funeral service

11:00a.m.

Immanuel Presbyterian Church

1100 N. Astor Street, Milwaukee, WI

Heritage Funeral Home – Milwaukee, WI

The final Just a Little Bit Cranky post

  This is Julie, Jon's wife.  I found this draft on Jon's computer.  Over the past few years, Jon had been exploring his family history in Detroit.  Recently, when he was in the hospital and suffering from hospital dementia, he often thought he was in a large car factory in Detroit, rather than in a hospital.  I took some comfort that he was mistaking all of the machinery attached to him for interesting automobile-building contraptions.  I am going to try to attach a link to Jon's obituary to this post as well.  

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/jon-olson-obituary?id=34925031

Olaf and Dorty

I think I may have posted this photo before. Can't get it out of my head. This is my grandfather, a farm boy from up north who came to the big city to seek his fortune, and my grandmother, in 1931, possibly on their wedding day in Detroit, or maybe in Richmond, Michigan, a little town a few miles north of Detroit. He was 29 and she was 23, and, if you can trust the dates, she was a couple months pregnant.

Family documents suggest they met at Ford Hospital, where he worked in the cafeteria and she was a nurse. Years later, Olaf became a line autoworker, which provided him financial stability for maybe the first time in his life. 

And here's another one, same day, maybe leaving on their honeymoon, with what I guess is her father's spiffy roadster: 

And here's Dorothy's father, Bion or "Bennie." Again, this could be the same day:

He has a puckish look, but he was forceful personality, a fan of grand opera and intolerant of incompetence or what he viewed as bad judgment, all of it backed up with an explosive temper. I don't think he went to college, but he got a law degree as a young man, attending night school and working days  in the massive rail yard in Cincinnati, repairing seats and railcar interiors. He met his wife, Charlotte, there, and they moved slowly north, with Bion practicing law half-heartedly in Kentucky and Ohio before finally arriving in Detroit, where, around 1912, the auto business was exploding.

Bion worked for Ford, including some time in the early years of the massive Rouge River plant, and as an outside contractor, an "auto trimmer," putting his railroad experience to work by inventing clips, sideboards and other interior items that allowed an autoworker to snap a seat or contour piece into place in a moment rather than having to resort to bolts and screws, a more expensive and time-consuming process. 

He collected dozens of patents, spent a lot of time in court defending them, and did very well for himself, accumulating two homes, a farm, a grain mill powered by a water wheel, a lake home, boats and beautiful cars for himself and Charlotte, including a Marmon (see below) built, not in Detroit, but in Indianapolis -- which maybe was a radical, even in-your-face choice, given his employer. 

Bion and Charlotte had three kids, and, inspite of all their success, the family suffered heartbreak and tragedy in the late 1930s that marked the generations that followed.

So I went to Detroit and stayed at an Airbnb for a few days, visiting the places where they lived and worked. Here's a few pix: 

*

Marmon, like most automakers, made many models of different sizes and features. This is one from 1929:  

                                       

Photo from Wikipedia under "Marmon Motor Car Company."

Here's the Rouge plant in 1927, then one of the largest factories in the world.   

Ford was powerful enough to re-route the River Rouge to allow factory access to its steady flow of ships, bringing in iron ore, wood and other supplies. As the company developed, Henry Ford strove to build an fully integrated operation, supplying everything he needed himself -- cutting trees for wood-paneling, mining the ore, forging the steel, harvesting natural rubber -- rather than relying on outside providers. Today, to a layman's eye, the Rouge plant has a crowded, chaotic look, with towers and smoke filling the sky like something out of "Blade Runner."                                                   

Photo from Wikipedia under "Ford River Rouge Complex."

This is the Rouge interior in 1944:

 I took a tour a few years ago, and the assembly area is all automated today, with the workforce reduced to just a few individuals here and there doing rote tasks.                                                                                               

Photo from Wikipedia under "Ford  River Rouge Complex."

This is the Piquette Avenue plant (now a museum), which Ford operated from 1904 to 1911, and where the Model T was first built. It has three stories, maple floors and lots of natural light, and seems "welcoming" in a way that many modern industrial plants do not. Cars were built here in stations or bays along the sides, before the development of the assembly line, and when finished they were wheeled out to a large elevator to the ground floor, where they were shipped out on trains. Henry Ford had a kind of "security room" here, where he and select personnel would meet to brainstorm, in private, new vehicles they weren't ready to announce. Ford himself is described as open to input in those sessions. 

Ford autos in this early era were in some ways assemblages of parts made by outside companies. For example, the Dodge brothers supplied Ford with drive trains for years, before they began to make their own cars. Visiting the Piquette plant, and reading other sources, one has the feeling that cooperation and curiosity made the early auto pioneers more congenial and less secretive than one might think.

The Piquette plant was later occupied by Olds Motor Works, later Oldsmobile. And, Fisher Body, which made car bodies, also had a large presence in the neighborhood, which today is littered with hulking plants, all of them empty.     

This 14-minute video tells the interesting history of the Piquette plant: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiwcmVlORWQ

Ford's major Detroit-area plants have been -- more or less in order -- Mack Avenue, Piquette, Highland Park (above, being demolished) and the Rouge. Their operations often overlapped. The shed where Henry Ford built his landmark "Quadricycle," in 1896, is now downtown Detroit, where the Michigan Building stands. The company's increasing need for space has driven it farther and farther from the city center with each succeeding plant. (And today, of course, it builds cars all over the world.) 

Henry Ford's Quadricycle, which had a two-cylinder, ethanol-powered motor.

Ford Motor Company image from https://corporate.ford.com/articles/history/henry-fords-greatest-innovation-the-quadricycle.html

Automotive pioneers, such as Ford, the Fisher brothers, Walter Briggs (a car-body maker), not to mention the founders and early investors in General Motors and Chrysler, accumulated astonishing wealth and lived very well. 

Ford and his wife Clara lived most of their lives at Fair Lane in Dearborn, a sprawling, 56-room stone mansion on a 350-acre site beautified with meadows, gardens and forests. (See pictures and maps at https://www.henryfordfairlane.org.)

Many other auto titans and other prominent citizens were residents of the Boston-Edison neighborhood. The Briggs and Fisher mansions are especially notable, and business people and famous cultural figures  -- Berry Gordy Jr. of Motown Records, for example -- also had expansive homes there.

 

 

Julia's mom

 

Obituary

Appleton - Betty Jane Hoffman Vosper, age 96, of Appleton, passed away on January 3, 2022, with her family present. She was born October 25, 1925, in Appleton to Paul and Clara (Kubitz) Hoffman and was a life-long Appleton resident, graduating from Appleton (West) High School in 1943 and Lawrence University in 1947 where she was a member of Alpha Delta Pi Sorority.

On September 26, 1951, Betty and James E. Vosper were married in the First Lutheran Church in Chicago, Illinois, a marriage that lasted 62 years until Jim's passing.

She will be sadly missed by son James (Mary), daughter Julia (Jon), grandchildren Jacob, Sarah, Ahna and Ezra, and great-grandchildren Eloise and Atticus.

She was preceded in death by her parents, her husband, and siblings Ruth, Roland, Gerald, and Carl. Also, she will be missed by her most persistent cribbage partner, Paul J. Hoffman.

Per her wishes, no services will be held.

Betty was a member of Appleton Memorial Presbyterian Church to which the family members request the dedication of any donations.

Posted online on January 05, 2022

Published in The Post Crescent

A homebound holiday

Mark Knutson on his last day.

We've been hermetically sealed in the house right through this Christmas except for Ms. V's dog walks, which so far I have resisted taking part in. I like the dog, of course (the required caveat), but I take the position that he likes and respects me even more because I don't stoop to his trivial needs. 

We had a plan to visit the daughter in Washington DC, but the Omicron variant was raging there and flights nationwide were being cancelled by the thousands, making our own return flight chancy, We didn't like the look of it, so we switched our flight to zoom calls with both kids, and that was a good temporary fix. 

And then we watched the Packers. We should have been reading The Satyricon, or Paradise Lost, or at least the Old Testament, but we didn't want to overdo on self-improvement on what is, after all, just a holy holiday. All of our prevaricating, hemming-and-hawing, and undoing of plans has delayed the annual mailing of the Christmas cards and we are working on that now.  But just in case we fall short, or Louis DeJoy gets mischievous, I'll paste one below. 

Last month (pre-Omicron, post-booster) we spent a few days in Olympia, Washington for my uncle Mark's funeral and related events. He was 80, a retired Lutheran pastor, and had nearly died at least once with a heart ailment, and the gathering was as much an extended family reunion as a way to celebrate Mark, which is certainly what he would have preferred.

So, happy new year to all!

*

Here's our card.

 

Friends:                                                                                                                                                                             

What with all the shooting, voter suppression, covid variants, and the impending end of the planet, it’s best, I think, that we just wander back to bed and lie quivering under a coverlet.

 

Otherwise, it’s been a pretty good year.

 

Ms. V and I diverted ourselves in recent weeks by watching way too much of the Beatles’ 10,000-hour “Get Back” documentary. Ms. V happy-cried through the whole thing, and, speaking for myself, I think some of their music may catch on.

 

Julia is happily retired and spending a lot of her time on yoga, and meeting with friends (outdoors, she wants me to add), and even more time, and way too much of the family treasury, on young Jamison, who is so darn cute. He likes to run – and run and run. Recently at Currie Park he explored a little foliage by the fence and came out with his fur matted with burrs. Turns out, he’d even swallowed one, clever fellow, and he started hacking and crying. This took place on Thanksgiving Day night, when most of your more reputable veterinarians are dining and watching football. Ms. V finally found somebody to take a look at him, and he said, for an astronomical fee, “It’ll pass.”

 

Nothing’s too much for a dog you love.

 

Ahna is a nanny in DC for a couple who work from home. She and the young boy play in the living room, have little lessons, go to the park, explore, and speak French all the while. The parents want their son to be raised bilingually, and Ahna fills the bill. 

 

Ezra is still a grad student at Stanford. He just finished a 116-page thesis, and I read the whole thing! His topic is the contemporary literary anthology from 1912 to 2017 and its place in history and the literary world. It is filled with footnotes, and it’s an impressive testament to his reading, writing and analytical skills. 

 

Myself, I’m just reading and writing and watching “Succession” when I’m not watching the Beatles. I’ve taken to walking, instead of biking, in this gloomy season.

 

We travelled to Olympia, Washington last month for the funeral of my uncle Mark Knutson. It became an extended family reunion, and this was the gift Mark gave us. He was my mother’s brother, the last of that generation. Mark was 80 years old and was fortunate to live that long, given a history of heart trouble, including a heart attack in his 40s that would have been fatal had he not been saved by a person nearby with some medical know-how. He was a Lutheran pastor with an easy laugh and the common touch – a man you could talk to – and he will be missed. In his last minutes he had a glass of wine on his back patio, with a view of Mount Rainier in the distance, and he was gone.

 

So now we crawl warily out of our coverlet to wish you a happy – and safe – new year!

 

           

 

 PAGE 2:

Jamison: His head abuzz. 

 

  

In the woods

The big tires at the big rock.

The last time I biked with any real gusto I was in Michigan and collapsed on a searing hot day on the Pere Marquette trail down by the town of Clare, if you know where that is. After three days there in the hospital I suffered the ignominy of getting a ride home from my wife for the second time in two years. See previous posts for all the gory details.

At home in Milwaukee, I moped for a couple of months. I rode my bike listlessly a half dozen times and slowly deteriorated to such a pathetic state that the prospect of a flat 20-mile ride seemed formidable. 

To get out of the house, Ms.V and I took a couple of little car trips -- overnight to Madison, where we found a lot of old professors sitting outside cafes thinking their big thoughts; and to our friends' cabin near Wautoma, where we shared the secret sign of the vaccinated by bumping elbows. 

And now, on our third sojourn -- and thank goodness for generous friends and relatives -- we're up at the Vosper island place, where the stone beach is white and the water is blue blue blue. 

And I brought a new bike. Just before we left I bought a used Mongoose fat bike on Facebook Marketplace for $300 -- pretty cheap in the world of bikes.

And I've actually had fun!

So here are some of my adventures on a fat bike in a land where mud and gravel rule.

The ferry landing.

Neighbors.

                                                                                  Still operating.

Everywhere.

 Hostile hermits.

 

                                                                  Sasquatch lives!

   

More neighbors.

Public restroom decor.

History Part 1.

History Part 2.

My trip and its unexpected end

 

 Hospitals are my business

To contribute to the Muscular Dystrophy Association, click here: Jon's MDA drive.

I promised to post updates on my bike trip as it happened, like I did in 2019, but wi-fi is scarce to non-existent in the wilds of western Michigan, so I'm finally getting to it now -- now that the trip is over. Careful readers will notice that this was not the planned end date, and we'll get to that.

Here's a little summary: 

In my ongoing quest to cross the country, I left Ludington early Wednesday, June 16, and followed the meandering roads of US Bike Route 20 into the Manistee National Forest. There was little wind, only modest hills and very little traffic, and this was easily the best of my three -- yes, just three -- riding days.

I took a break in the village of Freesoil, maybe 20 miles in, and was eyed by a lingering pickup driver who didn't seem inclined to share any of his soil, so I pushed on a couple miles to where there was a wooded site off the road with a big sign that said, "Camp Sauble Cages of Carnage." Now, I'm not going to pontificate on everything I saw, but Camp Sauble was pretty interesting. 

Camp Sauble

There were large chainlink cages set out across acres of land. Were they wild animal cages? Dog cages? I did a little studying. Turns out, no, they were boy cages. 

In the late 1980s this was a "boot camp" offered to young offenders as an alternative to prison in return for reduced time. One source called its methods "shock incarceration." As the Camp Sauble website says:

   From the moment the squad car doors opened the guards took total control. Inmates were slammed

   against the bumper of the squad car, called "Maggot" and "Scum" in true old school military style.

Good old military style.

Lately the camp has become a source of funding for local fire departments as a haunted house. Not so different from what it was.

 

*

I didn't know it then, but I was passing through a region pocked by small, amoeba-shaped lakes. Here's the rest of the day: 

Clear enough

Maybe "Sha Na Na" would've had more cachet.

Just in case you need to call 1995.  

Lucky 7 on a day off.

Development!

Lake country.

I was tempted.

Not hardly.

Calling me out by name.

My route. Nicely marked!

* 

My second day is best forgotten. I got lost at one point and went miles out of my way and had to go back, and, in another case, was misdirected by a sign, which sent me in a circle, costing me more miles. Though I spent a lot of time riding through trails in the Manistee National Forest looking for campsites, what I found were mostly privately owned lands within the forest. There are campsites somewhere there -- plenty of them -- but I really hadn't studied it, and in the end I rode to the little town of Ashton, charged my phone at an outlet outside the fire station, bought some food in the one store in town, and camped in a church's backyard. I tried to call the pastor, but his number was disconnected, so I thought it was safe, the lack of a pastor in this case being preferable. I didn't even set up my tent, just laid out in my bag -- and of course got wet. Yet still slept well. I left one of my "business cards" about my trip on my spokes, in case I was investigated. And in the morning it was gone. 

My card, front and back:

*

Well, of course, I didn't finish what I started. In the morning, my third day, I rode about 12 miles south, to the Reed City area, where, from a house at the edge of the Pere Marquette Trail, a man called out to offer me coffee. We introduced ourselves -- he was Mark -- and we sat on his porch and conversed for maybe an hour. He talked about his dogs, his life as a trucker and a cabbie, his wife, his grown kids who live next door. I told him about my trip. I lingered, thinking I had my day's allotment in the bag -- 30-something more miles on a flat paved trail? Easy. And meeting people -- that's part of it, right?

Mark with his "Norwegian Ridgeback" mixes, Turbo (left) and Axel. I think they are, really, Rhodesian Ridgeback mixes. He warned me not to make sudden movements around 

the young one, Turbo, and he had Axel scramble up the side of the tree 

next to his house as a demonstration of his prowess. 

I was impressed -- and too slow with the camera, alas.

At last I set out on the trail. For about 100 yards I thought, "This is great!" But it didn't take long to see how dull it would be -- wide, highway-like pavement, no shade, few turns, no up and down. I tried to keep a steady pace, but every few miles I kept thinking of reasons to stop -- I should eat one of my bananas; or how about a swig of orange juice? More than once I stopped altogether, set the bike down, and laid in the grass next to the trail, catnapping. I couldn't quite account for this, my dread of going on. I'm not a fast rider, but you wouldn't call me a shirker, and in retrospect it had to be the heat that lay like a blanket. I made a lengthy stop for soda and ice, and a few miles later stopped in a small town called Evart and got a giant milkshake, which I thought would jazz me up, but it seemed to slow me down, all my energy suddenly going to my stomach. 

I finally collapsed in a swerving, slow-motion way maybe 7 miles short of the town of Clare, my goal, where I expected to meet my friend Bruce. I had a clear sense that I was in trouble, but thought I could push through it -- what's 7 miles? -- and I was on the ground when a pedestrian discovered me. He said he was a former police officer, and he talked to me about my condition, asked me how I felt. I might have made little sense. He said he'd like to call an EMT crew. I objected, said I didn't need it, but he called anyway -- and it was the right choice.

I spent three days in the Clare hospital on a drip line taking fluids. My wife and the dog came and got me, and now I'm home, feeling vaguely like I'm still traveling and have happened upon a pretty nice rental that I'm disinclined to leave.

I wonder if I'll ride again, at least in the way I have. Getting hit by a car with my friend Mark in 2019, and now this -- it makes you think. Maybe a supported ride would work? I have yet even to take a local ride since my return, which I usually do almost daily. I'll be mulling it all over till spring.

 

Let's get this party started

 

Amish men on the boat

To contribute to the Muscular Dystrophy Association, click here: Jon's MDA drive.

I took my umpty-umpth ferry ride on the Badger in the last couple years and still found it, well, long. But it does force you to find a way to pass the time. For half an hour I listened to a couple of truck drivers -- long haul truck drivers -- trade secrets of the craft, involving braking and shifting techniques and the brand names they had driven -- Peterbilt, Freightliner, Volvo, International. They had such an easy rapport I wished I had something to say.

And a large extended Amish family had also embarked. The men wandered in ones and twos quietly observing. I saw one old man at a table playing, I'm pretty sure, sudoko. The girls wore bonnets and cloud-blue dresses and the boys wore suspenders and every last one of them was strikingly good-looking.    

I śaw a grandmother or two, and felt bad for an 18-20 year old girl who was assigned to child care and led the younger children through the boat like ducklings. 

*

Ms. V took me to the ferry this morning, Jamison riding shotgun, sorta.

Tomorrow I actually pedal!