Happy Birthday to Len

11/30/2022 

Today is Len’s birthday. I told him this morning I might write about him but I would let him read whatever I said first. He said not to run it past him, he’d like the surprise of reading it when you all do. Let’s see what I come up with.

1. This is cute. Len was born in Chicago’s Passavant Memorial Hospital which was the grandparent hospital to Northwestern’s Prentice Women’s Hospital - where two of our grandkids were born.

2. When he was eight he was hospitalized two weeks with encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) that he got after mumps. Len is adamantly NOT a vaccine-resistor.

3. His relatives were Polish, Bohemian, and German. He had (has?) relatives with cute names such as Zayenga, Lastovicka, and Ruszakowski. His great uncle Syl was Sylvester Valentine Ruszakowski. Top that. Lamberg is a real name, not messed up Lambert. There’s a Lamberg Castle someplace in Austria. Len is not a bit interested. Also, the guy who wrote down the lurid tales of Cassanova was a guy named Max Lamberg. I kid you not. 

4. Len does not like to replace things that are still working. (This includes wives.) He bought hiking boots in 1977, had them resoled couple times, and did not replace them until our son bought him new boots in 2021. Yes, that’s 43 years. If you were at my house this summer you may have noticed weird old boots planted with geraniums and now you know why.

5. A babysitter when he was really little had tuberculosis so he’s tested positive for TB all his life. Every few years someone makes him get a lung Xray.

6. His career was in advertising and marketing. Early on he worked on the Happy Meal team at a big Chicago ad agency. If you happen to remember the airport one from the early 80’s, that was Len’s idea and the writing on the box was his writing. His Happy Meal boss said she had never met a person who more perfectly intuited the interests and thought processes of a 6-year-old.

7. When he was young his very cool and very beat-up Mustang caught fire on an exit ramp of an expressway. A refrigeration repair guy pulled up right behind him, jumped out with a fire-retardant chemical he had, sprayed out the fire, and then popped back into his van and drove away. Len doesn’t believe in guardian angels except for that guy.

8. Len is unflappable. Once the basement of our Racine house flooded and he walked down the stairs to several inches of water glistening quietly across the entire floor and all he said was, “Well, this will be something.”

But the first night we came home with our first baby, he went to the stairs to call our dog – and he forgot our dog’s name. He stood there and then quietly whistled, “Hey, Dog, come on up and I’ll feed you.” What’s even funnier is at the same moment I cooed to our newborn daughter, “Oh Lisa, don’t cry.” We had not named her Lisa.

9. He has talked in his sleep exactly twice. Once, early in his advertising career and before we were married he sat up in bed and announced, “Worth every penny!” The second time was in the newborn stage of one of our kids when we were beyond exhausted. The baby cried again one night and Len turned over and mumbled to me, “It’s okay, Mrs. Olson will get her.”

10. He is astonishingly patient when he’s interested in something. (This has also worked out well for me.) He worked a year to restore a 50-year-old outboard motor for our son. Len gets motion sick easily, so it was about the motor, not the ride. He ALWAYS has several projects going on and mostly they work out. Well, the ski jump looking top on the fish tank to keep our cat out was odd but he got better at designing solutions as the years rolled on.

11. This was fun. Maybe next year I’ll tell you more. I can think of a lot of sappy ways to say I love him, but I won’t. You can probably intuit that I like him a lot.