p. 85
 
You celebrated your ninth birthday on July 19, 1990. I did not send you a card or let-
ter acknowledging this event. I intended to write you a letter as I have tried to do with all 
my grandchildren this past year. I am writing to you now to acknowledge your ninth birthday.
 
I realize that you are in Germany visiting your maternal grandparents.  This is good.  
I can forgive myself for forgetting to write you.  I know that your parents, Christa and 
Mike, made certain that you had a happy birthday.
 
At nine you are no longer a child.  You are a young boy.  Time fl ies and you will soon 
be a teenager.  I can remember when I was nine.  This was sixty-fi ve years ago.  Sounds like 
and is a long time as time goes by.  The year was 1925.
 
At that time we were living in the small town of Shedd, Oregon.  I was the second 
child and the oldest boy in a family of seven children.  My mother’s maiden name was Sophia 
Barbara Appert.  You know her as great, grandmother Shoen. She lives in Portland today.  She 
was born on a dairy farm in Hazleton, North Dakota.  She grew up there and learned to work 
and carefully care for people, animals and material resources.  As a young girl one of her 
jobs was to gather buff alo chips with which to build home fi res for heat and cooking.  This 
was prairie country with few trees other than those that were planted.  There were mostly 
fruit trees.
 
Her father walked twenty miles both ways each weekend to work at a job mining coal 
during the week.  This allowed him to accumulate the money with which to buy the farm and 
Dear Paul,
Paul W. Shoen
July  23, 1990
There’s only 100 cents in a dollar.
Don’t whistle at the pony while I’m trying to ride him.

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