• General Notes

  Mike was born in Lancaster, Ohio. He was a large baby at birth, 9 + pounds.
  
  He was always the rambunctious kid, resulting in early black eyes, injuries from jamming his finger into a metal toy car, resulting in the near removal of the finger and a ban on little metal cars in our house that lasted forever, and other small episodes.
  
  Mike wasn’t even 2 years old when in October 1957 his sister Diana was born. A couple of years later his brother Davis was born. Just after David was born his mother got very sick, and they shipped the children off for a couple of months to live with relatives. Mike & Diana stayed with our Grandma Zumbach and David stayed with his Mom’s sister, Juanita.  Fortunately she got better, and they all came home.
  
  His mother had her hands full with 3 kids less than 4 years apart. Mike was constantly into everything, so the only way she could keep track of him and take care of Diana and David was to take a dog leash and attach Mike to the clothes line, which apparently occurred a lot.
  
  As a youth growing up in a large tract housing neighborhood, there were many kids to play with. When they played pick up baseball they would have about 12 people a side. Mike was the most left handed person ever known. They used to joke, he couldn’t even pick his nose right handed.
  
  He and his brother used to fight and argue over everything. His favorite team was the Cincinnati Reds, although for a while he was an Oakland A’s fan.  David was always a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, since one of their second cousins was supposedly going to sign a contract with the Pirates. Of course many years Cincinnati played Pittsburgh in the playoffs and every year his team would beat his brothers
  
  One thing we always agreed on though was Ohio State football. The entire family felt it personally when Ohio State would lose to Michigan or one of the California teams in the Rose Bowl.
  Being the younger brother though he did teach David a few things, to this day he shoots pool left handed, use a screw driver lefthanded, and a few other things like that.
  When Mike was about 12 they bought a mini bike, and rode it constantly around the field behind their house. It was a tiny little bike, but they wore it out. It was this same field that their mom caught on fire once burning garbage.
  
  Mike maintained a lifelong love of motorcycles.
  
  Mike did the typical kid things, had a paper route for the Lancaster Eagle Gazette, shoveled snow to make money, and other chores like this. Dad was constantly yelling at him to stop spending his money as soon as he got it, but he never did.
  
  When Mike turned 16 he bought his first car, a Sunbeam Alpine. This was the first of what must have been 100 cars he had. His Uncle Paul knew someone back in West Virginia that had this car, and he and his dad decided this was a perfect first car for Mike. They went way back in the sticks to this house that they had to drive through a small creek to the house that had old dead trees as columns for the front porch. The car had real wire wheels on it, which were probably worth more than the rest of the car. It was a 2 seater, and the heater didn’t work because anytime they rode it in the winter time you still had to leave the windows down so that they wouldn’t fog up.
  
  This car was traded for a customized Volkswagen Beetle. He also once traded something for an electric guitar (which we couldn’t play), and later trading the electric guitar for a motorcycle that remained in parts in his room in the basement until it was traded, with the VW for a Ford. The Ford didn’t run and he used his father’s brand new jumper cables to tow it home to be fixed.
  Lancaster was growing fairly fast during the 1970s as more people moved out from Columbus. As a result the schools were very crowded. The classes regularly had over 40 kids in them. Wheen Mike went to Lancaster High School they had 2 shifts, a morning shift for the 11th and 12th graders, and afternoon shift for 9th and 10th grade. He wouldn’t get home from school until after 6 PM. There were more than 1000 kids per class.
  
  His dad had lost his job in the aircraft factory in the early 1960s, and took various jobs including building houses, and driving trucks. After a couple of years he got a job driving trucks for a company that delivered grocers for a large grocery store chain called A & P. I think some parts of the country still have A & P stores but for the most part they are all gone now. He drove trucks until 1970, when he got a job as a dispatcher at the same company. This job basically meant figuring out where all the drivers had to go to make their deliveries each day. After 3 years he was offered a promotion to be a manager of a trucking terminal in Salem, Ohio, which he accepted.
  
  Salem is about 180 miles from Columbus, so it meant they had to move from the only town they had ever known. This move was very tough on all of them, but especially on Mike since he had just completed his junior year in high school. They found a small house in a small town called Columbiana, and that is where we moved. Mike went from a high school that had almost 1000 kids per grade to one that had less than 100. The entire town only had 4000 people.
  
  The house in Columbiana was 1 block from the main train tracks between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Very long, very loud freight trains rolled through town at great speeds with loud whistles all day and all night. The house would rumble when they would go by. They also lived about 1 block from a foundry (small steel mill) that put out lots of air pollution and stunk. You could clean the windows daily and they would be dirty the next day, which of course drove his mom crazy.
  
  While living in Columbiana they had what remains a family legend to this day. Mike, Diana, David and their Mom were having dinner (hamburgers), since their father was out of town. Mike was picking on David about something to the point he became extremely mad. Something Mike said made Diana laugh, which set David off (even though she had nothing to do with it other than laughing). David threw my hamburger at Diana, missing, flying by her and sticking to the wall with the mass of ketchup that he had on it. Their mom (the neat freak) says ‘if that falls of the wall you are in big trouble’, which of course it did. To this day, Diana will remind all of the ‘hamburger incident’. And Mike of course gave his brother a hard time about this forever as well.
  There is a traffic circle with a flag pole in the middle of it, right in the middle of Columbiana. It is reputed that Mike once looped around that traffic circle more than 50 times, setting an unofficial record.
  
  Mike tolerated his last year in high school (1974) and got a job right away at the A & P beef packing factory where my dad was in charge of the trucking. He went through a few more cars (a Mercury Capri and finally a very cool 1970 Mustang).
  
  Mike worked second shift at A &P. One day they had about 10” of snow and he was supposed to shovel the walks and the driveway, but refused indicated he would be at work and his brother would get into trouble for it not being done. So David buried his Capri (that was parked in the street) with all of the snow from the sidewalks plus any snow he could shovel from the yard to get it sufficiently buried! Mike was quite mad when he went to go to work and had to dig it out for about an hour.
  A couple of years later they shut down the A & P factory in Salem and he moved to Garden City, Kansas where he Gloria Chavez. After a short time they were married, and Mike became the father to her two children, Manual and Isaac. In December 1991 his daughter Andrea was born.
  
  In 1995 Mike moved to Greeley, Colorado where he spent the rest of his life. Mike loved living in Colorado, and became a huge Denver Broncos fan.
  Mike loved camping, making campfires, kite flying and taking risks. He also loved his 1996 red Mustang. He had a great sense of humor. He loved being with his family, especially playing with the kids and enjoyed collecting and playing with his toys. He enjoyed the holidays, especially Christmas, and setting off fireworks on the Fourth of July. His hobbies were woodworking and painting.
  
  Mike passed away November 8th, 2001 of pancreatic cancer.

Details of Michael's family with Gloria Chavez