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I was born March 13th, 1913 the third child of John Henry and Aloween Greelis in Waterloo, Iowa. I was one of five children, sisters Madaline and Virginia and brothers John and Francis. My first home was at Fifty Two Franklin Street in Waterloo, Iowa where I was born. I later lived on Broadway, Real Street, and 320 Cutler Street, all in Waterloo.

I attended kindergarten at the Alcott School, first and second grades at a public school followed by the third through the eight at St. Mary's Catholic School and the ninth through the twelfth at Waterloo East High School where I graduated. I attended college at Iowa State Teacher's College (now called Northern Iowa University ) in Cedar Falls, Iowa. This was for two years, 1931 and 1932. In 1933 I started college at the University of Minnesota class of 1934 in Mortuary Science.

My first job as an intern was at the A. E. Henry Mortuary in St. Paul, Minnesota with a salary of fifteen dollars a week. My second job was in Devils Lake, N. D. for the Gilbertson's Funeral Home and Furniture Store. The salary was twenty-five dollars a month with board and room included. In 1935 I took my third job in Bemiji, Mn. for the Mc Grath an Picket Funeral Store at a salary of fifteen dollars a week. I also slept in the furniture store, as I was single. At this time Beltrami County only paid twenty-five dollars for a complete funeral service for the county burials, including the casket, embalming, funeral coach and cemetery service. I had to make the caskets in the basement of the furniture store.

The only side activity I enjoyed when I had time was bowling and I still remember the highest game I had was 258 while bowling with a team made up of forest rangers from Cass Lake, Minnesota.

In 1937 I purchased the funeral business of Arvid Mattila in Nashwaulk, Minnesota and I started in business for myself. I also had a side job of clerking in the Mattila Hardware and Furniture Store. At this time I did not own a funeral hearse so I did the embalming for the funeral home in Chisholm, Minnesota for the use of theirs. I stayed in Nashwaulk for three years enjoying single life while I saved a few dollars to be used later for a better business.

In 1940 I purchased the funeral and furniture business of George Boxell in Howard Lake, Minnesota. This was about the first of July and on August first I married Edith Rose Hancock of Coleraine, Minnesota whom I had met before moving to Howard Lake. We were married in Waterloo, Iowa at the St. Mary's Church, the same church and school I attended when I lived in Waterloo. My mother and father and all the Greelis family attended the service.

For the next twenty years Edith and I raised a family which consisted of two children, Linda and Thomas. Linda was born in 1942 and Thomas in 1945. We expanded our business from funeral, paint and wallpaper to appliances and bottle gas. We had about one hundred gas customers throughout the area. In addition we operated an ambulance service until 1950 when we donated the ambulance to the fire department.

In 1958, I purchased half interest with Dwight Vander Haar of the Worthington, Minnesota bowling center known as the Oxford Bowl. I remained in Howard Lake and Van moved from Howard Lake to Worthington to operate the business. We had ten lanes and a small cafe. We had no liquor license but we could sell 3.2 beer.

In 1960 I sold the Greelis Furniture and Funeral business to Russell Lee and his wife Joyce. Our family moved to St. Paul, Minnesota and we purchased a home on Pryor Ave. South. Edith and and I purchased a twenty lane bowling center known as the MIB (Midway Industrial Bowl). Edith operated the cafe and I operated the bowling lanes. At this time our daughter, Linda, attended St. Catherine's College and majored in nursing. Our son, Tom, attended St. Thomas Military Academy for his high school education. Also in 1960, we purchased the Family Bowling Center in Thief River Falls, Minnesota which is located about 300 miles north of St. Paul. This business was operated as a partnership with Mr. Carl Onkka, who took over the operation of the business. About two years later, I purchased the half interest of Mr. Onkka and hired a new manager. In 1962 I hired Mr. Kenneth Bergman to manage and operate the business. He was an excellent operator and the business started to make money.

In the spring of 1968, Edith and I closed the MIB bowling center and moved back to Howard Lake, Minnesota where we built a new lake shore home on the east side of the lake. In the mean time we hired Ronald Bourassa of St. Paul to move and operate the Oxford Bowl. A few years later, we sold the Oxford Bowl to Ronald and Pat Bourassa. Our home was a walk-out basement, two level building with a large double garage. In the summer, we had a nice dock that extended about thirty feet out into the lake. We enjoyed fishing from the dock where we caught all the fish we could use. We also had a boat and motor so we could fish and travel around the lake. At this time, Linda married Tom Alberts and they made their home in Cupertino, California. Our son, Tom, joined the U.S. Coast Guard where he served his country for the next several years. Tom attained the rank of Chief Petty Officer and devoted most of his time cooking. During this time he traveled to Alaska, Hawaii, and many other places. After he served his full time, he received his honorable discharge and then continued in the reserves to complete his twenty years of service. While in the Coast Guard, he married Linda LaRue of Portland, Maine and they had one child named Scott Greelis. However, this marriage was short lived and they separated. After Tom received his discharge from the Coast Guard, he moved to Thief River Falls to manage the Family Bowl. A short time later, he married Paula Fosse a teacher in Thief River Falls and a native of North Dakota. They have two children, Rachael and Tommy. Kenneth Bergman continued to work for the bowl on a part-time basis until his death from heart disease.

Linda and Tom Alberts lived in Cupertino, California after their marriage. Linda had her R.N. nursing degree and continued to work along with raising a family of three children namely, Michael, Kristin and Kelly. Tom worked for Signetics (a subsidiary of Corning Glass Works) where they made silicon chips. They had a nice large swimming pool in the back of their house. Linda and Tom were married in 1965 and separated in 1975. On April 6, 1977, she married Richard (Dick) Gemoets. They were blessed with one son, Adam, born August 17, 1978. Linda and Dick bought a fifteen acre parcel of land with a nice home in Aptos, California. Linda took employment as a school nurse in Santa Cruz and Dick worked for several computer companies ending up with Apple Computer Company.

In 1975, while Edith and I had Howard Lake, Minnesota as our permanent address we decided to spend our winters in Arizona. For the next five years, we rented in Phoenix and Sun City. In 1980, we purchased a two bedroom home at 18606 Palo Verde Drive, in north Sun City, Arizona. We both enjoy living in Arizona during the winter season where we could enjoy golf, trap and skeet shooting. We really enjoy the two citrus trees on our property with oranges and grapefruit. The back of our house joins the Union Hills Golf Club. We also have five palm trees and two evergreen trees. Sun City is a city of 25,000 population and is not an incorporated city. To live in Sun City, one must be at least 55 years of age as it is a community of senior citizens and no children live in the city permanently. Many of our friends from Minnesota live in Sun City so we are not alone for the five or six months we spend here. In the summer, the temperature stays above 100 degrees most all of the time. In the winter, it is in the 60's to the 80's in the day time and gets down to freezing a few nights.

On March 13, 1993, I celebrated my 80th birthday by entertaining all of our Sun City friends on our back patio. Both Tom and Linda left their busy schedules to fly here to help us celebrate. Edith had the food catered while Tom took care of the bar. We will never forget this celebration as long as we live. A few days after the party, both Edith and I had eye cataract surgery. This proved to be very helpful to both of us but it did delay our return to Minnesota for the summer. We drove our Lincoln the 1700 miles for the last time. From now on, we decided to make the trip by air.

We arrived in Howard Lake April 23, 1993 and rented a two bedroom apartment at the Heritage apartments. Tom was here the day before we arrived and had most of our furniture moved from the lake shore, but there is no fooling yourself that when you reach 80 years of age the lake shore work is just to much to handle. In other words, you have become just a poor pathetic creature.

Going back to the beginning of my life, my baptismal name was Thomas Vincent Greelis. I was baptized at St. Josephs Catholic Church in Waterloo, Iowa shortly after birth. I was born a normal child but according to my parents explanations to me, I came down with scarlet fever at the age of one year. The complications that followed is what caused my crippling for the rest of my life. No one seems to know exactly what my trouble was. I have asked every doctor I have seen and now can't even guess what my trouble was. It was a multiple septic' something in my whole body. My doctor was Dr. O'Keef and he told my parents that I had no chance to live and if I did survive, would never be able to walk. The doctor for some unknown reason lanced my two wrists and left leg going completely through the joints, then lanced my back and my left tempro mandibular joint in my jaw. Then the doctor advised it was only a matter of time before my death. However, there was one thing he did not think of-The Lord Jesus Christ. He said it was not time for Vincent to leave this world.

The following years of growing up I learned to live with the results. In my growing years, I had no problem walking or running but my two wrists showed the signs of surgery and I could not bend my wrists backwards and they are the same today. My main trouble was my jaw. I had an ankylosis of my left tempromandibular joint that prevented me from opening my mouth. Naturally, this gave me great difficulty in eating. What food I could get into my mouth was swallowed whole and my stomach must have gotten the message and digested it without any serious difficulty. However, I was very thin all these growing years and never weighed over 130 pounds.

As I reached the end of my growing, my left arm was about three inches shorter than my right. However, I did have the full use of my arms and legs and neither had any interference with my life. I was very strong and above normal in athletic ability which included pole vaulting, running and broad jumping. I was an excellent swimmer and tennis player. I also played basketball, baseball, and golf, but my favorite sports were hunting and fishing. I led a very active life, far above normal, according to my parents.

I never thought much about my disabilities until high school age. Not only was my jaw closed but it was disfigured and I had trouble eating at the school cafeteria. I should mention that at the age of about twelve, my parents sent me to the University of Iowa hospital in Iowa City, Iowa and the dental surgeons chiseled out all my teeth on the lower and upper jaw on the left side as they were growing inward. They also removed a lot of the jaw bone at the same time and this allowed room to get food into my mouth. My parents did all they could for me during my growing years. They took me to Chicago and to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Mn. to see if I could be helped but to no avail.

It was not until graduation time in high school that I realized something was missing. From the time I was a small child, I was very bashful and it grew into an inferiority complex as I grew older. When the junior and senior proms came, I did not attend because I had no girl friends. When I was attending the University of Minnesota, for some unknown reason, I visited the University dental school and was fortunate to meet Dr. Carl Waldron who was a teacher in the University as well as having a private practice in downtown Minneapolis. Dr. Waldron, I found out, was one the the best dental surgeons and face reconstruction doctors in the world. He took an interest in my case and assured me that he could be of help. However, at this time I did not have the time or the money to proceed. For the next few years, I kept in touch with Dr. Waldron and it was not until 1933 when I was twenty-five years of age and lived in Nashwaulk, Mn. that I completed plans to go to Minneapolis and have surgery. Dr. Waldron put me in the Abbot Hospital and with his assistant, Dr. Bollen, performed the necessary surgery which consisted of cutting out a piece of the jaw bone below the tempromandibular joint so that the jaw would open about one inch. After I left the hospital, I had follow-up work done in his office. He made an incision in my abdomen and brought up tissue and implanted it in my outer jaw area to improve my appearance. He knew that I did not have much cash so he sent me a bill for about $100.00.

When I returned to Nashwaulk, the whole word changed for me. I was twenty-five years old and had never had a date with a girl. I had a good friend, Speed O'Malley who worked in Grand Rapids and he introduced me to a couple of girls. One night Speed and I went to Grand Rapids to a football game and after the game we stopped in at the Club Alamo just to look around. He spotted four nurses that he knew sitting in a booth so we joined them and we had a few dances before we took two of them home. I told Speed that one of them was the prettiest girl I ever did see but I did not think she would date me. I found out that this pretty girl was Edith Rose Hancock of Coleraine, Mn. and one of seven daughters of Grace and Ross Hancock. I called her on the phone and she accepted a date so we went to Grand Rapids with friends and this started a long, very long relationship that has lasted for over fifty-three years without one fight or serious argument.

How was all this possible, one might ask and the answer if very simple. The answer is prayer. Everything I have or will have has been due to prayer. The lord was not joking when he said, Ask and you shall receive, and Seek and you shall find.

I discovered that I had parents who were wonderful not only that they were hard workers themselves but they saw to it that all five children had jobs of one kind or another. This included Vincent who at an early age spent many hours picking strawberries, school, garden work, selling papers both on the down town streets and on a regular paper route in the residential area. I delivered the papers every week day and collected from my seventy customers every Saturday morning. I can remember the cost of the paper to the customer was fifteen cents a week and I got ten percent for collecting. Every year my father planted a very large garden along with my help and in the summer I can well remember loading my wagon with radishes, onions, peas, corn, beans and potatoes and starting out early in the morning and did not come home until the wagon was empty. My best customers lived the furthest from my house (about five miles) in an area called Chatalque Park where no one had gardens. My folks gave me a percent of the sales so I could buy my own clothes and entertainment but a good part was put into my savings account so I could learn the value of saving. I bought my first bicycle with my savings for $15.00. It was a used bicycle but was all I could afford. Then as I grew up my type of work changed to cutting grass, shoveling snow, and spending many hours on the Sunnyside Golf Course as a caddy and would carry heavy golf bags all day for very little money. It was not uncommon to receive a nickel or a dime as a tip. In those days, they did not have electric or gas golf cars for the golfer. My mother had a home recipe for making soap for cleaning walls both painted and wallpapered. I will give you one guess as to who used the soap to clean walls all over Waterloo.

My father worked hard in the purchasing department of the Waterloo-Cedar Falls and Northern Railway Company. He never could afford a car so he never learned to drive a car. He walked to work early in the morning and walked home again at night. My father always found a job for me if I could not find one. I remember he used his influence to get me a summer job carrying water in the summer time to hard working men on the railway section crew. Another time he found me a job painting all the water hydrants in Waterloo and believe me there is one on every corner in the city of 50,000. When I reached high school age, I found a job that paid $2.00 for working from seven a.m. to nine p.m. at Black's Department Store and the work varied from carrying 100 pound bags of sugar to the candling of eggs that farmers would bring in.

Some way, some how I always found a little time for my favorite hobby which was hunting and fishing. My fishing was done mostly at the dam on the Cedar River right in the middle of the city business section. My fishing was limited to two kinds of fish, namely the catfish and the crappie. I would tie a rope to the lamp post on the bridge and slide down to the river. I can remember well the one night the fishing for crappies was so good that I lost track of time and I arrived home about three a.m. Needless to say, my parents thought I had drowned. My hunting consisted of rabbits and squirrels in my early years and later for ducks and pheasants. I had a pass on the railroad through my father's work so I could get on the train on Sunday morning and go about thirty miles from home to hunt. This was after attending Mass at St. Mary's Church at 5:00 a.m. Then I would catch another train back to Waterloo in the late afternoon. I forgot to mention that when fishing catfish the best bait to use was chicken blood. The only place to get chicken blood was at the Swift Company where they kill a lot of chickens. For fifty cents, they would fill my my little pail. By letting it dry in the sun and with a few feathers mixed in, I would put it on a triple hook and with a white bobber I would let it float down the current until the catfish would pull the bobber under water and then the battle was on. My folks liked wild game and fish and I was the only one in the family that brought any food home.

During my last three years of high school at East Waterloo, I was an active member of the track team and received my letter of recognition. My favorite events were the 100, 220, relays and pole vaulting. In my senior year I was the fastest runner in the 100 yard dash and could pole vault higher than any other member of the team. After high school graduation, I enrolled in college at Cedar Falls, Iowa and at that time the college was called Iowa State Teachers but now is known as Northern Iowa University. I owe a great deal of thanks to my sister, Madaline, who helped me financially in my education. Madaline at this time was not married and had a steady job of teaching high school home economics. During my college enrollment, I had a job of babysitting with a ten year old boy in the neighborhood. I would be able to do my studying and also receive the big pay of 35 cents for the nights work. In the summertime, I had a job in West Bend, Iowa where my sister Madaline taught school. My job was to rent out three overnight cabins and pump gasoline for Madaline as she started this little business as a side line to her teaching. It was located across the street from the world famous grotto that was built of stones from all over the world by Father Dobberstien. Also while in West Bend, I found time to help build corn cribs. For this, I received seventy-five cents a day and it was a long day with a brown bag lunch. In the fall of 1933, I enrolled at the University of Minnesota. My class was the School of Mortuary Science. My roommate was Eugene Premising from West Bend, Iowa. We had one room rented in an old house and we cooked all our own meals. Back in those years, you could buy enough hamburger for five cents to last a long time. We made our little spending money by changing storm windows and screens and also by refereeing softball games. I graduated from the University of Minnesota in the spring of 1934 with very good grades. I found a job in St. Paul, Minnesota for the next year to put in my internship and receive my license to embalm. This was at the A. E. Henry Mortuary on Snelling Avenue near University Avenue. Albert Henry owned the business and taught me the art of embalming along with Red Newhouse who was a licensed embalmer.

It was not long before I found out that in a small town the funeral business alone was not enough to make a living so another business was the furniture trade. In my case, in the furniture business, I also sold at retail items such as wallpaper, paint, linoleum, electric appliances, monuments, and even picture framing and a twenty-four hour ambulance service. A big sales item was carpeting both for residents and churches and other businesses. When the first television was introduced to the public, I was the first to own a set as well as the first dealer in town to sell sets and install outside antennas. The first sets that were made had very small screens like eight or ten inches and the picture was not very clear if you lived thirty or forty miles from the sending station. Two programs that were the first was Kookla, Fran and Ollie, and sports such as the Minneapolis Lakers basketball team and also the hockey games out of the Minneapolis station.

In the year 1960 I closed out my career in the funeral and furniture business and sold the business to Russell and Joyce Lee. After twenty-five years in the profession, I knew that I would miss embalming and retail selling. In a small town a person in business meets and knows just about everyone in the area. However, during my business career I found time at night after work to spend a little time at one of my favorite sports and that was bowling. We did not have a bowling center in Howard Lake and at first when I moved to Howard Lake the only bowling lanes were in Waverly which was only five miles east of Howard Lake. A few years later, new lanes were installed at Cokato which was only five miles west of Howard Lake. After selling my business in 1960, I purchased half interest in the Midway Industrial Bowl in St. Paul and half interest in the Family Bowl in Thief River Falls. Edith and I operated the St. Paul bowling center until 1968 when we moved back to Howard Lake and took semi-retirement at the age of 55 years.

Retirement gives one time to enjoy living to the most at things you never had time for in your working days. For me, it was a time to take a few trips hunting and fishing with my friends Floyd Munson and Omar Glessing. We made several trips to Ontario, Canada. Lake Ogoki was our favorite spot both for fishing and for goose hunting. On one occasion, late in the fall, while fishing we had a snowfall and on this trip our group included my wife Edith, Walter and John Kyle and myself. We caught a lot of northern pike and walleyes but the weather was cold. For every person that really likes to fish, a trip to Lake Michigan is a must. Fishing for King salmon is the most challenging of all fresh water fishing. When they strike your J-Plug, they break the water and give you the fight of your life. On my last trip with Floyd Munson, I had the pleasure of catching my largest King and it tipped the scale at twenty-five pounds. My last few years of fishing has been in the Thief River Falls area especially on the Lake of the Woods. This is a very large lake and one of the best walleye lakes in the United States. One must have a large boat and a big powerful motor so you can move fast in case of a quick storm and high waves.

I spend about half of the year in Minnesota and the other half in Sun City, Arizona. I have given up my golf game that I never did excel at and devote my sporting activity to skeet shooting. I am neither the best shooter in the Sun City sportsman club nor am I the poorest but when one reaches eighty plus you don't expect to break any records. I leave the golf game to my dear wife Edith and she really enjoys playing with the girls every Tuesday.

One other important event in my life, and that of my wife Edith, was the big surprise party our two children held for us on our fiftieth wedding anniversary in Howard Lake on August first at the American Legion Club. Our grandson, Adam Gemoets, along with his mother and our son, Tom, decorated the hall with computer generated banners and balloons. We had a very large crowd and all our relatives and friends came from far and near. It was an occasion like my eightieth birthday party that I will never forget the rest of my life. Alas, thus concludes the first eighty years of my life.