Someone asked me the other day what was the most difficult thing I had ever done in my life. I got to thinking real hard, which is not good, it gets all the BB's rolling around up there in the big hollow pointed thing & some times cause me great confusion. Anyway I thought of some of the real hard stuff I'd done, like stay in the Army for three years without going to the stockade even once. Although I'd been busted numerous times & pulled many hours of extra duty. Or how about the first ten years of marriage, or for that matter marriage at all. Or trying to raise a couple of wild boys. Or....or maybe it's all of these things, like trying to grow up & not really wanting to, having an old body doesn't mean at all that I've grown up, there is still the mind of a very confused youngster here in this old body at times. The older I get the harder it is to grow up.

Anyway I wanted to tell my story about growing up in WY during the '40's & '50's. I was born in New Castle, although my family lived in Upton. The closest hospital was in New Castle. I was the only child my mother had in a hospital. She had six other children, one still born, one died before a year, then two girls, a boy & another girl. Her first husband had buried the two that died somewhere out on the prairie near Moorcroft. True grit! The oldest living girl was thirteen when I was born.

My father had a previous family as well, all but one boy were grown. He was about a year older than the oldest step-sister. I believe my mother considered this to be a possible problem, so he was sent to live with some friends in Upton. Isn't life fun. This boy finished high school, went into the army right after WWII, went to college on the GI Bill & became a teacher & married a beautiful lady & had two beautiful kids & later retired as a principal. True grit! He did however legally change his last name, I believe to spite our father for sending him away.

My father worked in a bentonite plant in Upton & had for quite a few years, & did butchering on the side. He also liked to drink, alcohol that is. Everyone that knew him said he was one of the most pleasant men they ever knew. He could recite endless numbers of poems, mostly Robert Service & Rudyard Kipling not to mention a lot of bar room poems. He had also had polio as a small child, his right leg was about three inches shorter than his left & about the size of his arm. He limped badly & as the years wore on it became more & more painful for him to get around. True grit! Both my mother & father were left over's from families that had come to WY in the early 1900's to homestead & didn't make it for what ever the reason.

Life was good in Upton. My older siblings (step-siblings?) were very good to me, as was my mother & father. I would accompany my father on butchering missions & for years associated the smell of gun powder with the smell of death for some unsuspecting cow or pig. I spent most of my time with my mother at our home, playing while she did her house chores. Taking a nap was always special, sometimes my mother would lie down with me, particularly if I was having a bad time going to sleep. She would rub my back & sing to me until I went to sleep. Sometimes she would sleep too. On these occasions if I woke up first I would touch her face with my hand, she had the most beautiful skin & it felt so soft & cool & smooth to my touch. I could tell when she woke up because she would begin to smile before she opened her eyes. I loved her very much.

It was about the summer of my fourth birthday that the family moved to Sheridan. I'm not sure why but the speculation was that it was the geographical cure for my fathers drinking. My mother having come from a long line of drinkers knew about geographical cures & such. Her first husband also drank too much. My father had landed a job at the local flour mill. We settled in a small rental house on Sumner & were there for about a year & then moved to a small house on E. Burkitt on the east side of the creek. The house was located right next to the creek. The two older girls went to high school & the younger ones including myself went to Central. I began the first grade, it was the fall 1946. My father's younger brother had come to visit.

My older brother & sister that went to Central came & took me out of class one day saying we had to go home quickly, something was wrong. We stopped under the bridge over Goose Creek & cried for awhile. It took sometime for the me to piece all of this together, what happened was my mother had ran away with my uncle. The second drunk was irreparable just like the first, so she needed a third. Anyway the step children that were my mother's were sent to Casper to live with their father & I missed them terribly. I ended up with his father.

My father bought me a brand new suit & an overcoat & a dress cap. We were off to California where my father had three older children living. It was Christmas 1946. One of his children was a daughter that was married & had two children, one my age. She was married to a man with a business involved in making bill boards for movies. The business was very successful. I believe the plan was to leave me with this older step sister & family, if that was the plan it didn't work, the nephew my age & I fought about every waking moment.

Now my father had a real dilemma, what does he do with a kid while he tries to find a job. Well the solution was to place me with a family that took care of children on a full time basis. It was real terrible there, I had to sleep in a baby crib & the older children living there (there were about 10 kids living there ranging in age from 4 to 14 years old) made fun of me. Some of the older boys pretty much ran the show taking what they wanted & beating up on the younger kids. One of the neighbors was caught trying to molest me in a hammock in the back yard. It was about a 6-8 block walk to school & I would get lost often because the fog was so thick, I would often just sit down in frustration & cry until the fog lifted enough to proceed. By this time I was developing a real bad anger attitude & some real good fighting skills. Then one day my father came & got me & we were on a bus headed back to WY. It was April 1947.

My father went back to work at the four mill where he met a man that had lived in Sheridan County all of his life. He had his own ranch at one time but the depression was tough on marginal ranchers & he went broke. This man said he & his wife would be willing to keep me on a full time basis for $45.00 per month after all they had a son the same age, the deal was struck. My father & I arrived one evening suit case in hand just as the family was ending their dinner. I began to play with some toys scattered around on the floor, their son got down from the table & gathered all the toys up & put them away. This began a very long difficult relationship between he & I.

Their son was smaller & a whole lots less angry so he lost all the fights. He had his own way of getting even though, like having his folks buy him a nice bike & later several autos & nicer clothes, etc. They wore out a lot of broom handles & more that one belt on me but the relationship did not improve until the two of us had enough, this was quite a few years later. I finished the first grade at Central, following the creek & playing along the way going & coming home. Second & third grade we went to Coffeen.

One day while in the third grade I was playing on the hill in back of where we lived. Where we were playing lined up perfectly with the street running away from us. As I looked down the street I could see a woman walking toward us, at first I thought it was my mother but then shook that from my mind. But the in a few moments I looked again & it was my mother. I began running down the hill knowing she was coming to get me.

I was mistaken. She had brought me a new pair of red cowboy boots. She tried to explain to me that according to the law she could not take me with her. I really didn't want to hear this, I could have my suit case packed & be ready in a few minutes. She left without me. I wished a thousand times that she hadn't come & two thousand times that she would be back. I needed some grit here, damn a bunch of wishing.

My oldest half sister that lived in Casper had got married & asked me to come stay with them during summer vacation, Christmas & Thanksgivings. I loved doing this. I got to see all of the other half sisters & brother I had grown so close to. I really hated going back to Sheridan & staying with the people my father had chosen. As I look back now I can see it had nothing to do with them, they were trying to be a family to me & I couldn't or wouldn't accept them as that. Sometimes life doesn't go exactly as we want.

We then moved to another part of town that put us going to Linden for the 4th, 5th & 6th grades. School had always been fairly easy for me, I got by with minimal study & did good enough on tests to bump along with B's & C's. In fact when I took the battery of tests given when going into the service I qualified for OCS but was trying to maintain a low profile so turned that down.

Their son did not pass the 4th grade, he had a really bad time trying to read. Most likely he was dyslexic. This was unheard of at the time but dumb wasn't. He received a lot of ridicule. He was anything but dumb, his mind worked best with things mechanical & things built of lumber & things that need to be done with his hands. In later years he did learn to read & write, I loved to get letters from him, they were so well written & informative. He died at the age of sixty a very horrible death as the result of too many unfiltered Camel cigarettes & working with some hazardous paints without the proper equipment, if there is such a thing. We did make our peace & learned to love one another like brothers. Life does indeed take some strange twists.

I had by now tried to run away several times & was brought back properly lectured & or spanked by my father, older sister, the people keeping me & anyone else they thought might have an affect. This was really to no avail, I had a real bad mind set going by now & would not be swayed with facts. On to Junior High we go.

The man of the house where I was staying had a brother that owned a ranch about 60 to 70 miles mostly due east of Sheridan. It was one of the most beautiful places I can remember. We went there to help them with shearing & docking sheep, branding & castrating cattle, slaughtering turkeys, hunting & generally a lot of playing & running all over the country side on horse back on my part. Anyway while returning from there one night in the fall after hunting we had a car wreck. The ranchers son was driving I was in the middle & another boy was riding shot gun. There was a case of 60 dozen eggs & our rifles in the back seat. I was dozing in & out when suddenly I heard a lot of gravel being thrown into the wheel wells & the car pitching wildly toward the drivers side. I was knocked out but was told later that the car rolled three times, throwing the passenger thru a barbed wire fence only sustaining minor injuries, leaving the driver in a daze sitting on the ground uninjured & myself hanging out the back window with the back of my head split open & my neck hurting so bad I could hardly hold my head up.

I came to crying trying to figure out where I was & what had happened. It was fairly cold & I wasn't wearing a jacket & couldn't figure out why my shirt was all wet. It was blood from my head. We walked about 10 miles that night to the closest ranch for help. They were in the process of giving us a ride to town when the folks in town came looking for us, worried that we weren't home yet. Anyway I had 12 stitches in the back of my head & was told nothing was broken or damaged in my neck. It was quite a few weeks before I could hold my head up right, I really believe something was broken in there, it has bothered me ever since. There were several more car wrecks before it got better. On to high school.

There is a commercial on TV showing a woman running down the street with one high heel shoe in her hand, a bumper sticker stuck to her behind &looking pretty frazzled. She runs into a parking place in front of a school & begins to honk a canned horn she is carrying & shouting for her daughter coming out of the school. A friend of the daughter's says, " Isn't that your mother?" to which the girl replies "No" & turns her back on her mother. In real life when I was about thirteen some friends & I walked into the Palace Café, the local teen hang out at the time, & there sitting in a booth right next to the door was my dad looking real bad.

I had never seen him in this shape before. He had always taken pride in the way he dressed, yet here he was looking like a bum in ragged clothes & a dirty cap on his head, staring into a cup of coffee. I couldn't believe my eyes. One of my friends said, "Isn't that your Dad?" To which I replied, "Are you kidding?" & kept walking ashamed of my dad & embarrassed that someone had recognized him. Four years later after suffering from the effect of a shattered thigh bone on his good leg from a jammed dump truck tail gate that suddenly swung open & a couple of operations on his stomach for cancer he died. He was sixty-one years old. I have always been sorry that I didn't try to help him that day. Pride is a terrible thing.

I had played football & basketball in the 7th & 8th grade & had worked all summer in the hay fields the summer before starting my Freshman year. Nothing I could have done, short of running from Sheridan to Cody over the mountain several times, would have prepared me for the 1st week of football. I don't know why it was called football, we never saw one for at least two weeks. All we did was run & do push-ups, leg lifts, jumping jacks & a whole bunch more then more running 2 hours at a clip twice a day. Trying to get out of bed the second morning was real fun, I struggled up & reached for my pants & fell flat on my face. Those that were left at the end of three weeks were all in shape. Then we played football.

Some other real important thing began to happen about now also. The 1st was that all of a sudden the girls began to look so good & my ability to say the simplest thing to them disappeared. The second was I discovered alcohol. The third was tobacco. School began to get tougher. I began to get into trouble with the law.

There were usually dances at one or more of the near by community halls (Wyarno, Dayton, Ranchester, Decker, Kearney) on Fri & Sat nights where I & quite a few others like myself tried to hone out social skills. This usually meant seeing how much beer, wine or hard liquor we could consume on the way to one or more of these dances & then try to pick-up on any of the girls that showed the slightest interest. Smoking a cigarette made one look so much more mature, so that was in order as well.

What generally happened after fueling all these ego's with alcohol & hormones pumping was several fights in the parking lot & some getting it on in the back seat of more than a few cars. Then the problem of getting home was in order. There were generally car accidents or the police waiting at the city limits. I truly wonder sometimes how any of us made it thru that. As I look back now my social skills didn't move too far past this for several years.

I spent the rest of my high school years raising hell & staying in trouble. All I thought about was Fri & Sat nights. It didn't seem to matter the punishment, I just took it in stride & kept going. My grades fell in the toilet but some how I still had enough credits to graduate, except I needed one semester of English that I had some how missed. About a third of the way into the last semester before graduation I was given the option of trying to make up this class. I of course put my whole heart into half-assing it & with six weeks left knew I wouldn't make it & made another brilliant decision & quit school all together. I loaded up my motorcycle with all I could carry & went to Casper.

I got tangled up with a pretty bad bunch of people & ended up involved in a crime where a gun was involved. I was still seventeen when arrested, so there was a lot of discussion as to what to do with me. I told the probation officer I had not been involved in any thing serious before & I guess he didn't check it out. After spending about six months in their lovely county jail I was given five years probation & set free. I tucked my tail & headed back to Sheridan. I was never again involved in another larcenous crime, there were many bar room fights & other drunken scrapes with the law, but never locked up for trying to steal something.

I tried to enlist in the army, along with the boy I had been raised with & they ended up taking him & not me. I had a felony against me now. A year later with a different enlistment officer & another friend I tried it again. I lied when asked if I had been arrested. This time they took me & not the friend. I was off to Ft. Hood, Texas for basic. When we first arrived & fell out for our first formation, we were addressed by our first sergeant. He was without a doubt the biggest, blackest man I'd ever seen, then or since. He had a magnificent bass voice & didn't need a loud speaker to be heard. I thought he set the tone for our time in basic pretty well when he said, "We have two ways to teach you boys here, the easy was or the hard way & I don't give a damn which way you learn it but you will learn it."

I surprised myself & did what I was told & stayed out of trouble during basic. Everybody got orders for their next duty station except me & one other fellow from Pa. We were both being held over for criminal investigation. After two months he left. I was there for another four months before our CO called me down to his office & informed me that the investigation was complete & that given the results he should recommend I be discharged. However since I had not caused any problems of any kind, in fact had helped out with the training of other boots coming in, he would recommend I stay in if that is what I wanted.

I told him yes I wanted to stay in. On to Ft. Gordon, Georgia for a short time & then to Ft. Bliss, Texas where I spent the remainder of my three years.

I believe boredom is the biggest enemy of the military. The old saying of hurry up & wait is a very real feature of the services. Consequently there are a bunch of young guys sitting around dreaming up all sorts of crap to get into. The bunch I was associated with always liked to drink a lot of alcohol first then dream up the crap to get into. Unfortunately the military also is really big on promoting drinking. There was nickel, dime nights at the NCO clubs & always cheap drinks otherwise. And at Ft. Bliss there was always Juarez. Granted there were the bars where nothing but prostitutes & other sleeze hung out, but there was also some clubs frequented by mostly Americans, male & female that played live loud rock & roll, had cheap drinks & a great dance floor. This is where I hung out.

One night while out cruising in El Paso with a couple of my buddies we were stopped at a traffic light when a Buick convertible with two young ladies inside pulled beside us. We began chatting while going down the street for several blocks & finally convinced them to ride with us. They did & my life was changed forever. I was smitten, love at first site, what ever it's called I had it. I've heard it said that the eyes are the window to a persons soul. She had the most beautiful, knowing, twinkling, sad eyes I've ever seen. A delightful sense of humor & a hardy laugh. We began seeing each other every free moment I had.

The two girls were cousins. They had grown up in a small town in Virginia. The town had been a deep water creek port during early America but had kind of shriveled up over the years. Their grandfather had been a prominent area doctor. He & his wife had two children a son, the father of the cousin, & a daughter the mother of the girl I had taken up with. The son had been killed in a boating accident on the Potomac River. His wife had remarried, a Texan, & was living in El Paso. One day while sipping whiskey from a glass her esophagus burst & she bled to death at the kitchen table. Another horrible death. The cousin & her sister, ages about 14 & 16 at the time, packed their mother up & took her back to Va. for burial. While in Va. they talked the other girl into going back to El Paso with them. She needed to get away anyway , she was in the process of a divorce from a sort of childhood sweetheart that had the old ideas of marriage. The wife should stay home & clean house & guard the fort, bare foot & pregnant would be best. She had her own ideas about all of this. First on her list were horses, that was probably second & third as well. She loved horses. A friend in the town had a stable not far from Mt. Vernon with a large field where there were polo games each week & there was a great need for someone to exercise these same polo ponies & to take care of them. The marriage & all of his old ideas had to go. She decided to leave town until the dust settled.

Another tragedy. Her father had had a problem with sinus/migraine headaches most of his life & took prescription medication for this condition. His death certificate read, cause of death "Bromide Poisoning". He was forty-two years old. This girl was fourteen & had two younger sisters & a younger brother. The mother took up drinking & four years later with the assistance of the courts her daughter had her committed to the state hospital for alcoholism. She was released & within a few months began drinking again. Diana & I were married Dec 7, 1963 & her mother died Jan 23, 1964 from cirrhosis of the liver. Another horrible death.

A year later & we have a son. I am a father!!! I can't believe I am a father!!! Shortly after this Diana's youngest sister, fourteen comes to live with us. I had started going to night school & struggled thru three nights a week for four years to get a two year degree in accounting. Diana worked at Ft. Belvoir & I worked for an electronic manufacturing company. Diana's oldest cousin from El Paso, now living in Virginia had a baby boy, six months later she over dosed on sleeping pills & died. We adopted the baby.

It seems at times that two life times have passed to get to this point in my life & a very few years to get to where I am now. We started & lost a beautiful tennis & racquet ball facility, met a lot of great people in doing so. Raised two great boys, the oldest is divorced & had a near fatal motor cycle accident several years ago & lives & works in Alexandria, Va, the younger son is married to a beautiful girl, owns a restaurant in Virginia Beach, Va & loves to play golf. Dec. 7 will mark Diana & my forty years anniversary, this may not seem like a lot to some of you but to Diana & me this has been a very large order. There has been a lot of thick & thin, rich & poor, good & bad, up & down, etc. We have managed to hold on thru some pretty rough times & she hasn't shot me yet so I guess we'll stay together for awhile longer.

Diana retired from the federal gov't three years ago( she was a Program Analyst for the modernization of aircraft carriers). We've been to a couple of launching ceremonies & went for a cruise on the Stenis, what a beautiful piece of work these huge machines are. Also what a beautiful piece of work are all the crew members. Anyway she retired & I continued to work for a couple more years at the marina across the street from our home (we also have a boat there). But work was getting in the way of all the fun things we have been getting into lately, so I retired too. We have played tennis for quite a few years but got real serious after Diana retired. Also we bought a pair of mountain bikes last Christmas & have been riding all the trails around here. We have some real good Rails to Trails trails in our area. Also There is good trail running from Mt. Vernon to Alexandria, also the C&O Canal which run from Washington 185 miles way up into MD. We do this a couple times a week generally riding 30-35 miles at a clip. Weather might drive us inside for the winter, riding stationary bikes at our health club.

This all I have to write. I know it's awfully long, but it's my story & I'm sticking to it.