Les Kuehn:  

My parents bought their home in 1949 when I was two on Oakfield across from what we always called Fargo park. Where I played ball in the summer, pick up football in the fall, and skated and played hockey in the winter. I attended Bow for Kindergarten and then Coffey till "I was bused to Larnard while Coffey was being expanded to make it a Jr. High. I walked to school everyday no matter how hard it was raining or how much snow there was in the winter. During summer vacation when I wasn't going to summer school which happened often, I would leave the house on my bike and usually ended up playing ball somewhere. I've never won the lottery and probably never will but I have been so lucky in other ways, Being able to grow up where I did was the luckiest thing that could ever of happened to me. I graduated from Henry Ford in Jan. of 1965 and like I said before I wasn't a great student but someone had to bring up the rear and I did. i worked at Chrysler after graduation till I was drafted into the Army on Aug.18 1966. The Army decided that I should go to medical school where they trained me to be a Combat Medic in ten weeks. I was in two different MASH units the 15th field Hospital and the 28th surgical hospital and the last eight months I worked at Womack Army Hospital at Ft. Bragg.When I returned home after my stint in the Army I worked for General Motors for nine months till I went to the Detroit Free Press and served my apprenticeship as a Sterotyper. In Jan of 1991 I was promoted to Night Operations Manager for the Detroit Newspapers. It was my job to to oversee the production of the Detroit Free press and the Detroit News at night. I was also the liaison between the two editorial companies at night. When I was hired in 1969 my boss told me no o ne would ever yell stop the presses. Well I was the Night Operations Manager for nine years and I stopped the presses three times in that time. The first time was when the ground war broke out in Iraq in Jan of 1991 and every paper we produced that night had the story in it. The other two times weren't that big of a story but one of the stories would have made the Detroit Free Press look pretty bad. I worked for the Detroit Newspapers for 34 years before I decided it was time to retire on May 1, 2003. The first thing I found out after I retired was that work is over rated. When I was in the Army I told my Dad when I came home on leave the first time that the next time I came home I would have a mustash, have a tatto and be airborne. Well it didn't take me long to figure out there was no reason to jump out of a perfectly good airplane that was going back to where it came from so no Airborne jumps for me. My Dad had asked me not to get a tatto becuase it would have upset my Mom so no tatto for me either. In 1997 I turned fifty and my father had passed away in 1987 but Mom was still alive I decided I was going to get that tatto and I just wouldn't tell Mom what I did. So I came home with a Panther and my name under it on my left arm. My wife knew I was going to do it and she didn't have a problem with it. Well my son went nuts because I had gotten a tatto, he asked me if I was having a mid life crisiss. I then asked him how many people did he know 100 I was ...Expand for more