Mainard Timeline?

I had friends at the Missouri memorial today, who tried to fill me in on events. (Others who were present will post more about that later.) But some of the details are getting a bit mixed up in the retelling of the saga of his life. I thought that the blog might be a good vehicle for sorting some of this stuff out, & reconstructing a time-line. People on this blog have probably been direct witnesses to some of the events of his life, & we can kind of straighten out details together.

He was born Chester Michael, on September 8, 1953, I believe. Since his father & grandfather were both also Chester Mainards, he went by Mike or Michael through school in Oak Grove, MO. We graduated from Oak Grove High School in 1971.

We both went to the University of Missouri-Columbia, from which I graduated in 1975, but Michael left school our junior year, it seems to me. (He was going through a lot of stuff.)

Those of you who knew Chester, or even Erik, might have trouble recognizing the Michael I first knew. He was an Eagle Scout (hand to God! I was at the ceremony & saw Blondie pin the pin on him with my own two eyes!), & in college he joined Naval ROTC. (His ROTC commander practically WEPT when he left the university!) His leaving the university was a major break -- a major change in the way he defined himself -- a time of major upheaval.

After he left school, he went over to Israel to live on a kibbutz. He was something of a seeker in those days, & at one point talked about possibly converting to Judaism. But once in Israel, he found himself far more sympathetic with the Muslim underdogs, & he ended up cutting his stay short.

Now, somebody stated at the memorial that one of his wives was Israeli, but that is not so. He had been writing to a Danish penpal named Anne-Lise Sogaard for several years. (I think since high school.) When he commented to her in a letter that he was leaving Israel, she invited him to stop in Denmark on the way home to the States, & he decided to do that. He wanted to stay & explore Denmark for a while, but he had no money. My impression at the time was that he married Lise so he could live & work in Denmark for a while, & so she could come to the States with him for a while afterwards, & they had agreed to marry on that basis. But you know how that turned out -- she wanted to stay married... Things got a bit ticklish later. (Among other things, I had sent him an urgent aerogram to Denmark telling him not to marry her -- which he had already done -- so she figured I was the enemy. But we EVENTUALLY became good friends, & corresponded for some years after her return to Denmark...)

I remember serving Michael & Lise an INSANELY spicy pot of chili in an apartment I had in the summer of 1975, when I was finishing college with a single summer term. So they were already married & back in the states by then. They both got jobs in Columbia, MO at a school for the retarded (that's what we called it back in the dark ages) -- which is where Michael first learned sign so he could work with deaf children at the school. But they separated in late 75 or early 76, because he was single in that time frame... He was still living in Columbia, Missouri in October of '76, when my youngest sister died, because he was the one who drove me back to Columbia after the funeral.

It was also some time in the mid to late 70s that he became Erik. He was plagued by the fact that Michael was a common name, & wherever he went, there were other Michaels. One year, in his college dorm there were something like 6 other Michael's on the floor...

Anyway, at one point, he was applying for a job, & the interviewer told him, "Look, we would really like to hire you, but we already have 2 (3?) other Michaels here -- is there something else we could call you?" He christened himself Erik to get the job. (I was trying to remember what Lise called him, but I didn't spend much time with them when they were together -- that enemy thing. And after they broke up, she always referred to him as Michael -- because I did?)

Erik moved to Wisconsin, but I am not good at remembering dates. I think it was probably early in 1977. (Anybody out there remember?) It seems to me that I drove up to Wisconsin to visit him with 2 friends of mine, & my best recollection was that that would have been spring in 1977. The visit was not a huge success, & we had a quarrel by mail, & did not speak for a while. (Again, he was going through a lot of changes.) I moved to Excelsior Springs, MO in late 77, & Michael/Erik called & was going to come visit me so we could renegotiate our friendship. But as luck would have it, a bad blizzard blew in, & Michael had to call & cancel that meeting, because he had to drive from Oak Grove to WIsconsin in the blizzard...

We both went through a lot of address changes after that, & lost track of each other. (Didn't help that I married & changed my name, or that I had no relatives left in Oak Grove.)

I know that at some point, he married again. All I know about his second wife was that she was Danish, too, because he joked to me that of all the people he had known, & all the places he had been, wasn't it odd that both his wives had been Danish? But I don't know her name, or where or when he married her. And when I asked him about it (while we were busy rebuilding our friendship) he didn't answer. (We had so much catching up to do that we missed some bits. Anybody know his second wife?) But neither of his wives were Israeli, & the wife he brought back from the Israel trip was definitely Danish, & he told me that his second wife was Danish, too.

I finally tracked him down through his grandmother, Gracie, when a mutual friend of ours was dying in the mid-80s.

It must have been in the Wisconsin years that he took up dancing, finished his bachelor's degree, got a Masters in counseling, started doing massage work & work for the medical school, but the telling of it to me was all kind of jumbled up & out of sequence. I would love for somebody to help me sort this stuff out. Does anybody remember dates or details?

I know that he started traveling to teach while he was still living in Wisconsin, but he kept his home in Wisconsin until it just seemed silly for it to be empty more often than he was there. At that point, my address in Sumner, WA became his mailing address. He left me a big stack of signed checks, so I could pay his bills, & I would email him wherever he was so he could tell me how much to pay on things like credit cards (where there was actually a choice in the matter.) We have lived at this address for 14 years or so, but I can't remember the exact duration of his using our home as his base. (He told me at the time that people were horrified he would trust me with signed checks, & we both laughed about it.

By the way -- I want full credit. I am the one who bullied him into getting email. He kept asking me why he would possibly need email, & I finally gave him one of our email addresses (we were on Prodigy, & had 5 addresses -- so I cheated.) During his gypsy years, he started demanding that everybody else get email, & his laptop computer became his link to many of us, no matter where he went... He joked that he was prosyletizing others as earnestly as I had prosyletized him.

The gypsy years were lovely for me, because I was homeschooling a young child, & didn't get out much, but Michael was sharing his adventures with me almost every day. (During intense patches, we sometimes emailed 2 or 3 times a day.) Once he settled down & had more of a regular life, he was busier & we didn't correspond quite as much.

I don't really remember the exact date he settled in Oakland, or the exact time he became Chester. I know that my son first knew him as Erik in the late 80s. And I know that just about the time I was able to switch from Michael to Erik, he decided he was Chester... (That's when I started addressing my emails to him "Dear You." Any of you who helped him by reading his email when he was having trouble reading, that's why the ones from me were always addressed that way.)

So help me fill in some of the details. My guess is that the Erik/Wisconsin years will be the least represented at either memorial, so the folks who know him from that period, in particular, need to keep us from messing up...