I am thankful to live in a small town

I received a call from the paper asking if I would be willing to write a short piece about what I am thankful for. My reply was, “Absolutely!” I said that I would write about why I came back to Shawano.

In 1972, I enlisted in the U.S. Army right out of high school. I needed to support myself and was not certain that I wanted to attend college at that time. I also had a romantic vision of big city life, so when I left Shawano, I did not think that I would ever return to call Shawano my home. I assumed that I would end up living in some big city.

During my three years of active military duty, I lived on the east coast, the central and southern United States. I was posted overseas and was always near a large city or a population center. I took frequent trips to Seoul-South Korea, New York, Boston, Dallas, Oklahoma City, El Paso and St Louis, just to name a few.

The last city I was stationed near had a battle going on between rival factions of the Little Dixie Mafia. Each weekend, there would be a number of stabbings and shootings in the city.

Each working day on the base, we would gather in the section room prior to the day’s training. On Monday, one of the sergeants would read what we referred to as the box score, which was a small section on the front page of the paper describing shootings and knifings over the weekend.

Based on the locations of these violent incidents we would be told that those areas would be off limits to soldiers the next weekend due to safety concerns.

We all talked about the weekend’s violence, but we would also talk about our hometowns, and violence like that just did not happen. I was raised on a farm and would always talk about how wonderful life on the farm was. One weekend in the spring of 1975, an extraordinarily violent crime was committed over a drug deal gone wrong. The following Monday, we were all talking about that very violent act prior to the training day beginning.

Besides being in the military, I had a job in the evening managing a local restaurant. Monday evening, when I got to work at the restaurant, that same violent crime was the hot topic. I remember one of the waitresses asked me if we had knifings and shooting in my hometown. My response was, “No, unless things have changed a lot during my three-year absence.”

Sometime during that week I made the decision that I was going to move back to Wisconsin and specifically to Shawano, Wisconsin, to live out my life and raise my family. I married my wife in 1978, and we ended up buying our home in the suburbs of Zachow. Not inside the city limits of Zachow, but in the suburbs from where we can see the street light in Zachow, Connie and I raised two children in this home.

In Shawano County, people are friendly and polite. Shawano County has great churches and schools. Our families are close by. To me, Shawano County is a special place, and I am so grateful that I live here.

You know the saying that the grass is not always greener on the other side? I would like to change that to the grass is not always greener in the big city. I am so very happy and feel so blessed that I chose to make Shawano my home and to raise my family here. In Shawano County, there are not many knifings or shootings, and when someone is killed in a traffic accident, it makes the news.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving and may God continue to bless each and every one.

COL(R) Richard W Kucksdorf, Zachow, is the chair of the Republican Party of Shawano