Where are They Now? Featuring: Ken & Nancy Fischbach by Cheri Kemp Long before tiny home living was a trend, Ken & Nancy Fischbach were already doing it in the form of their RV motorhome. Ken & Nancy lived full time in their RV “for ten years solid” as Ken said, after retiring in January 2000. I was able to
speak with the two of them on the phone recently and could tell they were very content in their retirement and in their now permanent home in Phoenix, Arizona. That new permanent home is still a ‘tiny home’ and is called a Park Model home located in a park with 500+ park model homes in it. “We have a club house and an activity cen- ter. There wasn’t one vacant space in the park this winter” said Ken. Ken began working at Crest Foods in September 1970 and Nancy in January 1973. Many, many years later, Ken said “one night Nancy came to me and said ‘I want to sell everything and go on the road.’ I almost fell on the floor! I then asked her if I was invited to go along! We made the decision (to retire & travel) and haven’t looked back. We had a smaller RV for 3 to 4 years before we retired and enjoyed it so much. We would spend weekends in our RV somewhere close by so when we made the decision to go on the road, we bought a bigger RV and decided we would live in it full time!” Nancy chimed in and said “we sold our house and everything in it at auction after we retired in January 2000. By March 2000 we were on the road. You know what? It is a very small world. I could write a book on people we have met who know of Crest Foods, or Ashton, or where we went to school, or know someone we know. We made so many friends as we traveled and when we were traveling to their area, we had a place to stay and visit these new friends. We never had a bad time in our 10 years spent traveling. It was perfect. Just perfect. We visited every National Park and every Presidential Library. We might have been on our way to some destination and if we changed our minds, we just went with it. We went wherever the wind took us.” “I wouldn’t do anything different” said Ken. “People need to realize how short life is. I see lots of guys working 40 years. They should retire 10 years earlier and have some fun. Don’t forget to put in there (in the article) that I do a lot of golf. I want the guys to be jealous! I even used to Marshal on the golf course for Pro Golf tournaments!” With a lap top computer in tow, Nancy Fischbach found the time to finish a genealogy project she had spent 20 years researching prior to retiring. “I spent the first 10 years of our travels putting it all into the computer. It covers Ken’s and my families and goes back to 1620,” said Nancy. Ken added that there is now a copy of this in the Mor- mon Library and Nancy also sent a copy to her home town library in Morrison, Illinois. Now that Ken & Nancy are stationary they have each found something to occupy their time. Ken, as he mentioned, plays a lot of golf. Nancy has learned how to thwart the Javelina’s (a type of small wild boar) that roam in Arizona by building flower pots that are raised off the ground. “Those little buggers like to eat my flowers! I stack large flower pots together to make tall pots, then get stones from the creek behind our house and cover the pots with the stones. Now people are buying them from me because they like them so much and the Javelina’s can’t reach the flowers!” In the early 1970’s, when Ken & Nancy first started at Crest Foods, as you can imagine, it was a much smaller place than it is now. Ken first started in Mix which was located in the downtown Ashton building (now known as the North Plant) at a time when Crest only had 20 or 25 employees. He then became a production manager for two
18 Crest Ink July, August & September 2018
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker