Modern science tells us that the universe where we live began 13.8 billion years ago in a moment of time called the “Big Bang.” Our galaxy the “Milky Way” formed about 13.6 billion years ago while our own solar system was formed only 4.5 billion years ago out of material from a super nova explosion of a very large star.

It wasn’t until I got older that I realized that as individuals we are just borrowing ourselves from our universe. Science tells us that the universe was permeated only by energy. Some of this energy congealed into particles, which assembled into atoms like hydrogen and helium. These atoms clumped first into galaxies, then stars, inside whose fiery furnaces all the other elements were forged.” I like to think of myself as a small bit of this energy in a human body made up of Earth elements.

We all began as a single cell with information that had been passed down from the beginning of life on Earth. From the information in the DNA of that one cell, the zygote, we were constructed and maintained throughout our lives. To allow our specific DNA to build our bodies we had to have nutrition from the Earth. That building and fuel cycle has lasted in each of us for our entire lives. We are just borrowing from the universe and at some point, in time we will return the energy and whatever nutrients that we still have back to the Earth. We are just borrowers! This process has been going on with all life on Earth, we are just the only life form that realizes it!

I wonder, am I the boy who liked to jump off the porch holding his mother’s hand over and over until he got too tired to do it again, the boy who rode his fire truck off the porch after breaking through the banister or the boy who caught fireflies in a glass jar in the thick grass in the summertime?

At almost 80 it is hard to think of myself as this young boy or the young man who went to college, worked in public schools for 30 years had three families and lived among the mountains of New Mexico. Time passes and before we know it, we are reaching old age. This is why I am writing what I remember as a younger person. I remember most of my life’s experiences vividly. It feels good to write it down for others to read sometime in the future.

“The universe is not designed for us to last in perpetuity.”- Sidney Poitier’s mother

Chapter 2 - The Inspiration

In 1982 I was helping my mom, Clara Mae and dad, James “Lee” move from a home that they had lived in for the past 45 years to an apartment on the other side of town. They were getting older and had decided that it would be good to get out of their old neighborhood in Houston’s East End and move to an apartment complex in a nicer part of town with a pool and on a city bus line. My wife, Linda2 and I found for them the perfect place, the “Woodlake Apartments” on Westheimer Boulevard.

My dad was a collector/hoarder but since he had made his living as a draftsman most of his life, so he was very neat. His printing was impeccable, and he neatly stored all of his “junk” either in the garage or in a small storage shed in the back yard. The house was a small one in Houston’s east end in the Mason Park Subdivision. It was purchased with the GI Bill for $1 down and $68 a month.

I offered to help them to move and became the major factor in what was to be saved and what was not. In cleaning out the garage, I found a cigar box with a white label on the end with the words “wire too short to use” neatly printed on it. I opened it to discover its contents and sure enough it was filled with short pieces of wire that he was saving just in case they might be needed sometime in the future! In Lee’s mind you never know when you will need something that you have. I think that was the mind set of someone who had lived through the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

This relates to my thoughts about myself as I approach old age. I will be 80 years old in 2023. Maybe the memories that I have now will no longer be with me in the years to come. That is the reason for writing about my life now. Not that it was all that interesting, but I lived through a definite point in time in definite locations. It is worth remembering!

Covid-19 Virus - “2019 novel coronavirus or SARS-Co-V-2”

In early 2020 people in the United States began to be affected by a new virus that began in Wuhan, China in 2019. The disease that it caused was a severe respiratory one that was sometimes deadly, especially the elderly. At first everyone thought that it was only contracted from animals to humans in the Chinese market, but before long that was no longer the fact. It was contracted between humans and the virus was very good at that transmission. By March of 2020 it was evident that it would become a world-wide pandemic.

At the time of the beginning of the pandemic I was volunteering every week at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden,the New Mexico History Museum, and the Pecos National Historical Park, and occasionally at the Visitor Information Booth downtown for the Bienvenidos group of the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce. (My wife Susan and I had not begun to volunteer for them until summer). All that came to an abrupt halt as all of these places were closed and New Mexicans were asked by the governor to follow the strict guidelines of wearing a mask, distancing from others at least six feet and thoroughly washing your hands whenever touching anything from outside. Susan and I adhered to all of the suggestions since we were both in the age group that was the most at risk for serious consequences or death from becoming infected.

By the summer of 2020 the virus had infected more and more people in the world and especially in the United States where many had not taken the mandates seriously. By the end of 2021 more people had died from it than the 1918 Flu! Epidemic! Finally, there were more and more restrictions put in place in New Mexico. Our plans were to continue to be overly cautious until a vaccine became available, and we could be assured that we were fully protected from infection.

It is at this point that I decided to begin writing my story. By the end of February 2020, I had taken both of the Pfizer shots and a couple of months later Susan had her Moderna ones. Later in the year we both got our booster shot as well. In the early days of 2022 another variant, Omicron, had taken over most of the new cases in the U.S. This variant was much more transmissible, but less deadly. With so many new cases reported every day we decided to go back to being more cautious as before. Only going out when we had to and not eating out in restaurants. By the spring there were fewer cases reported and the New Mexico mask mandate was resided. We looked forward to more normal interactions in the months to come.

I currently can remember many experiences growing up in Houston, Texas. I remember all of these things in the Statler Brothers song “Do You Remember These?”

“Saturday morning serials Chapters one through fifteen (I always went to the Avalon Theater to see a double feature, two cartoons, a serial and the news reel. At first it cost 7 cents then it went to 9 and then 11 cents. I handed out flyers in the neighborhood for free passes as well.)
Fly paper, penny loafers, and lucky strike green ("Lucky Strike Green has gone to war", the company claimed the change was made because the copper used in the green color was needed for World War II. American Tobacco actually used chromium to produce the green ink, and copper to produce the gold-colored trim.”)

Flat tops (never had one, only a burr), sock hops (usually because the dance was on a basketball court), Studebaker (we had two of them), "Pepsi, please"

Ah, do you remember these?

Cigar bands on your hands (made neat rings!)
Your daddy's socks rolled down (only the girls did this)
Sticks, no plugs and aviator caps, with flaps that button down
Movie stars on Dixie cup (ice cream) tops and knickers to your knees (I never had any knickers. My dad did though!)

Ah, do you remember these?

The hit parade (looked forward to see what the new, most popular songs were for the week), grape Truaide, the Sadie Hawkins dance (girls asked the boys to dance)
Pedal pushers, duck tail hair, and peg in your pants (this could be a problem for young boys in a classroom situation!)
Howdy Doody (I watched him on B&W TV in the afternoons)
Tootie fruity (gum)
The seam up the back of her hose

Ah, do you remember those?

James Dean, he was "keen", (he died much too young), Sunday movies were taboo (Blue Laws and religious reasons)
The senior prom, Judy's mom, rock 'n roll was new (I saw Elvis in person twice in Houston; couldn’t hear him sing though because all the girls were screaming)
Cracker jack prize (we all collected these and traded our duplicates)
Stars in your eyes (being in love)
"ask daddy for the keys"

Ah, do you remember these?

The boogie man (scared little kids), lemonade stand and taking your tonsils out (I never lost my tonsils)
Indian burn (rubbing the hairs on someone’s arm until it tangled) and wait your turn and four foul balls, You're out!
Cigarette loads and secret codes and saving lucky stars

Can you remember back that far?

To boat neck shirts (I used to really like to wear these) and fender skirts (our ’57 Chevy had these) and crinoline petticoats (made their dresses stand out)
Mums the word and dirty bird (a slang that you called someone) and double root beer float
Moon hubcaps (we had Spinners on our ‘57 Chevy) and loud heel taps (I would have taps put on my shoes, Stacy Adams cap toe and wing tips, at the shoe store in Junior High. They went with my leather jacket that I wore in hot or cold weather) and "he's a real gone cat" (a really cool person)

Ah, do you remember that?

Dancing close (more on that later), little moron jokes (these were pretty cruel) and "cooties" in her hair (tell girls that to make them squirm)
Captain Midnight, Ovaltine (I drank this on cold mornings at a friend’s house before school) and the whip at the county fair (a ride at Playland Park as well)
Charles Atlas course (for skinny guys who want to build up their muscles), Roy Rogers horse (went to see Roy and Trigger every year at the Houston Fat Stock Show and Rodeo), and "only the shadow Knows" (a radio show)

Ah, do you remember those?

Gables (Clark) charms, "froggin" your arm (poke another guy’s bicep with your knuckle to make it swell up), loud mufflers (steel or glass packs), pitching woo (we never called it that, we called it “grubbing”)
Going steady, Veronica and Betty, white bucks, and blue suede shoes (these were popular after Elvis’ song came out)
Knock, knock jokes
Who's there?
Dewey
Dewey who?
Do we remember these, Yes we do! Oh do we? Do we remember these!”

I can remember them all! I lived through the time when all of these were relevant to kids at the time. Later on you will read how I personally experienced some of them!

Chapter 3 - My Beginnings

I will begin by setting the stage for the present by going back to the early beginnings for me. I have had a great life even with some of the trials and tribulations! I consider myself to be one of the lucky ones! I was born, Kenneth Lee Bower to two young parents in Hillcrest Hospital in Waco, Texas. My parents were caught up by the times. In the early part of 1943, my parents James Lee and Clara Mae Bower found themselves in a world embroiled in a war of monumental proportions. Their nation had entered a war two years earlier in December of 1941 against Germany, Italy, and Japan. They were only a small piece of humanity living in the world at the time who were experiencing forces that made demands which were far beyond their control. Lee, a sergeant in the U.S. Air Force, had been assigned to Waco, Texas where he was being educated to fill a particular nitch in a war which would in time involve the entire population of the earth. His pregnant wife, Clara Mae, was there to give him support as he trained before the inevitable transfer to the theater of war in the Pacific. On an extremely cold night on February 10, 1943, the process of my birth began. After a sleepless night for both young parents I came into this world around nine o’clock in the morning. I was born the next morning on February 11. (This means that my actual beginning was sometime in June, 1942!)

First House - 2101 Windsor, Waco, Texas

On February 21, 1943 (ten days after my birth) I was given a book “Log-O’-Life”. In it were pages to record events throughout my life. I have kept up this book until today! In it among many accounts of my life are messages from both of my parents when I was ten days old. Here are their messages:

Father’s Message to his Child

“Dearest Ken:

You sure are a fine boy. Bright eyes, full of mischief & rearing to go. You are strong too with a fine healthy build. Your mother & I helped give you all that & I hope you will be as proud of it as I was all my life. You have a sweet disposition & a lovable smile, that is your own. Here is hoping you always have those.

Life is full of ups & downs, but remember Ken, for every down there are 2 ups. Also remember that your mother & I love you very much & are behind you 100%

Love, Dad”

Mother’s Messaged to her Child

“Dearest Kent, today you are sleeping in your crib, a wee bit of humanity depending on your dad and me for your well-being. I see in your bright eyes a look of faith and I hope that you may always have faith and trust in Me, not because I am your mother, but because I have worked and earned it. I hope to be your pal as well as a friend, to talk over the little things as well as the big things of life. You’re growing up in a war world of hate and greed; I want to teach you above all things to have faith in the future, in people and in yourself. I must have you believe that love rules over hate. I want to teach you to be sincere in all that you do and say. Your name itself means leader, and I want you to lead others and inspire others to higher heights. I want you to be gay, to laugh, to love and enjoy life. I only hope you will grow into a man as fine, honest, and loving as your dad. On my mirror is pasted this verse, ‘May you like and follow the challenge it gives to make today a better day than the last.’ ‘Yesterday is only a dream, Tomorrow is only a vision, But today well lived, Makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope.’

Your loving mother”

Not long after my birth conditions changed for me. My mother and I went back to Houston, Texas to the home of her mother, Dora and father, Fred Madden. My father went away to a war which was to eventually claim the lives of millions of people and drastically changed the lives of everyone involved for years to come. He was fortunate to return home unhurt to continue with a life based upon choices of his own. He was based in Tinian/Saipan for much of the war after his training schools in the U.S. He trained as a B-29 airplane mechanic/navigator in Alamogordo, NM, Denver, CO and Seattle, WA. after being in Waco, Texas. My mother would always join him and live off-base until he was transferred to another location until he left for the Pacific Theater.

When he returned after the war was over, we all lived with my mother's parents at 101 Bedford Street in the Pineview Addition of Houston, TX until I was seven years old.

My first memory of my dad was when he came home from the war. I was three years old. I waited for him all dressed up on the front porch sitting in a little painted Mexican chair with a woven seat. A yellow taxi pulled up to the front of the house and a man got out wearing a uniform carrying a duffel bag. It was my Dad!

I didn’t see my other grandparents very often. Lee’s mother, Ruth Etta Griffith (Nonna-she went by Eloise) left his father James Allen Anderson in North Dakota when Lee was three years old. She and young Lee left while Jim was at work (he worked on the railroad) and never got in touch with him after that. (I think he had been abusive toward my grandmother!) Later in life Lee found that Jim was still alive from one of his aunts, and we went to see Jim and his wife Hazel who lived in Siren, Wisconsin. He was the Soo Railroad station master/telegrapher there. We kept in touch but were never close. They lived in the brick railroad station in the winter and at a house on a lake in the summer.


Jim Anderson, Nonna & Lee	Jim & Hazel Anderson

Lee’s mother was a very talkative woman. I remember Lee’s stepdad, Harry Lee Bower turning his hearing aids off from time to time when he was around her. She met Harry in Wyoming sometime after leaving James Anderson. He was a cowboy there at the time. He had served in WW1 and had changed his name from Harry Bauer to Bower because Bauer was the German spelling. It means “farmer” in German. He also legally adopted Lee and had his name changed from James Allen Anderson to James Lee Bower. They always called him “Junior” even though his name was no longer the same.

Later on, Harry, Eloise and Lee lived in Galveston, Texas. Harry worked for the government as an inspector of imports from other countries at the port. He would determine the duty to be paid. They later moved to Houston where he worked at the Custom House inspecting imported goods at the port of Houston. That is where I remember them living. I stayed with them once that I can remember. I remember he moldy smell of the books that “Nonna” had saved from my dad’s childhood and a walk we took on the sidewalk from their house down the street. There were a lot of big trees lining the street. I think it was in the Montrose area.

From Houston they moved to Nogales, Arizona where Harry worked on the Mexican border as a customs agent. I never went to visit them, but from time to time they would come to Houston to visit in their travel trailer. They lived in a mobile home in a trailer park in Nogales where they were the hosts. They had very little influence on my life.

Chapter 4 - First Memories

My first memories were living in my grandmother Madden and grandfather’s house. It was a yellow clapboard duplex later covered in gray asbestos shingles. It was on a corner lot where Bedford Street intersects with Pineview Drive in the Pineview subdivision close to Harrisburg Avenue which went from our part of town to downtown Houston. My grandpa was a carpenter and helped build the house. Before moving there, they were living on Avenue W which was close to the Houston Ship Channel. That was where my mother grew up where she went to Burnet Elementary School, Edison Jr. High and Austin High School. All Houston East End schools.

Chapter 5 - Early days in the Pineview Addition

Fred and Dora Madden

We lived in one side of a duplex with my grandmother and grandfather. My uncle Preston Madden, his wife Lanille and their two children Barbara, “Bobbie Nell” and Gary Wayne. Bobbie Nell was about ten or more years older than me, and Gary was three years younger than me.That is when I began calling my mother “Mimi.” Bobbie Nell called her mother Mimi and I began calling mine that too. (Mike and Pat didn't come along until later)


Preston	Bobbie Nell & Ken	Mike, Gary & Pat

I remember as a baby, sleeping in a crib with someone putting a sheet over the top of it and scaring me through the bars. The crib was in my grandmother and grandfather’s bedroom where I slept until we moved when I was seven. While living there I got a “big” bed, but I kept falling out of it during the night, so grandpa made six-inch railings for it to keep me from rolling off onto the floor. It worked! Other early memories in the room were the owls making noise in the middle of the night and playing on the floor with grandma’s button collection that she kept in a jar in the bedroom closet. That and catching the lightening bugs in the grass in the summer were all that I remember from that early time period. I do, however remember playing with several friends in the neighborhood.

My mom and dad slept in the next room that also had a telephone table and chair and a gas heater. In addition, there was a living room with a big blue sofa, an overstuffed chair and a table and a kitchen with a small breakfast area connected to it. The house was on piers, so there were concrete steps leading up from the front and back porches and into the kitchen and living room. There were grape vines growing on the fence next to the kitchen door that weren’t very good to eat and eleven pecan trees growing around the house. There was also a big fig tree and a Kieffer pear tree in the back yard. I thought everyone always had pecans, figs and Kieffer pear preserves to eat!

I can remember being loved and protected by my family. The days were about the same. Grandpa would go to his worksite in his car; my dad didn’t have a car and would go to work downtown in the Esperson Building on the Harrisburg bus; my mom and grandma would stay at home. Until I went to school I would be at home as well, spending my time playing in and out of the house. From time to time I would ask to see my uncle Preston’s tapeworm. He had always been overweight and had taken a pill to lose weight. It worked! It contained a tapeworm egg and when it hatched inside him it grew to great lengths. He was suffering with it and was taken to the doctor. The doctor decided his problem was the tapeworm and gave him medicine to have it pass out of his body. Grandma would inspect his bowel movements daily and found the worm. It was several feet long and she put it in a little glass vial with alcohol and kept it on the bathroom shelf. It was always a treat for me to take a look at it!

Since I was an only child, I received a lot of care and attention. I really enjoyed my mother reading to me. My favorites were “Uncle Remus Stories” and “The Little Jeep” which was about an army jeep who came home from the war and could not find a worthwhile job. I liked all of the Golden Books, especially “The Saggy Baggy Elephant” and one about an animal that made strange sounds in the woods. I also always cried when I was read “Little Boy Blue” by Eugene Field!

It was a transition of time from the pre-war years to the boom of the 1950s. I remember a vegetable vender who drove a horse and wagon selling vegetables in the neighborhood and the ice truck that delivered blocks of ice to some of the people who still had ice boxes instead of refrigerators. The ice came in big blocks that were scarred so that they could be sold in quarter or one-half blocks. I used to walk down the street and watch them unload and cut the blocks into smaller pieces to fit into the family’s ice box.

I played with several other boys who lived in the neighborhood. Howard Hill who lived across the street lived with his mother, grandmother, and grandfather. His grandfather was a Houston policeman and raised fighting roosters in his backyard. I remember Howard showing me a box of the spurs that they would strap on the cocks before they fought. Pretty nasty looking! Dickey was another one of my friends as well as Bernard. Bernard always wanted to be the mother whenever we would play “house” on our front porch. He always wanted to sweep and cook. He was the first gay person that I ever knew. He was gay from the beginning! He was also the first Jew that I ever knew. I didn’t know what a Jew was, but he told us he was one. I guess I thought that a Jew was a sissy. He was less than six years old at the time. Years later he and his partner visited my parent’s house and he definitely played the female role in that relationship.

Howard, Me (with white rabbit pet), Benard, Mimi and Dickey

A vivid memory that I have living on Bedford Street was going to the night farmer’s market a few days before Thanksgiving and Christmas downtown by the Houston Coliseum to get a live turkey. We would go in grandpa’s car (a big, black Chevrolet sedan). Newspaper was put down on the back floorboard in preparation for the bringing the turkey home. After grandpa picked out a turkey that was acceptable (just the right weight and not too much corn in its crop). Its feet would be tied together with a string and the bird would be placed on the floorboard of the car. It was my job to hold it down until we got home. Sometimes it was pretty messy!

Once home grandpa would put the turkey in a cage in the backyard. The day before it was to be cooked grandpa would cut its head off with an axe (he wouldn’t let me watch) and bring it around to the side yard where grandma had poured boiling water into a large, galvanized tub. We would dip the turkey into the water then take it out and pull out all of the feathers. (I would save the long wing feathers to play with later on.) The turkey would then be taken into the kitchen in the house where newspapers were spread out on the galvanized kitchen table. Grandpa would cut the turkey open and take out everything from inside (pew!). The guts would be thrown away, but the heart, gizzard and liver would be saved to make giblets for the gravy and the stuffing. (The gall bladder would be removed from the liver as well since it would spoil the meat if it was broken.) The turkey would then be rotated over the kitchen gas range to burn off any of the small feathers that were left then it was placed in the refrigerator for cooking the next day. (Another stinky smell!)

Another memory of the kitchen is when we would gather pecans from the eleven pecan trees around the house and put them in piles to dry on newspaper in the kitchen in the winter. Also, when my uncle Preston would go to the gulf side town of Port O’Connor every year he would bring back several burlap bags of fresh oysters. They would also be poured out on newspaper on the floor where grandpa would shuck them and put them in glass bottles before placing them in the refrigerator. I would eat as many of them raw as I could while watching the process after dipping them in a mixture of catsup, Worchester sauce and lemon! Grandma would fry up some for us to eat as well.

We had friends that I remember from the time I was very small. Norma Jean, Ray Shaver and their daughter Carol. I believe that my mom and dad met them while living in waco. They moved to Houston too and lived in the Denver Harbor Subdivision. We all would spend time together on picnics and various holidays. Carol was about a year or so younger than me, so I remember growing up around them from time to time. Carol even named her first son, Kenneth. Norma Jean and Ray divorced and we lost track of them after that.

There was also a man who would come around the neighborhood every year with a horse. I would put on cowboy clothers and my parents would pay him to take my picture as if I was riding.

Chapter 6 - Elementary School

I started school while we lived in the Pineview Addition. My school, Andrew Briscoe Elementary School, was about a mile or so from our house. We didn’t have a car. My mother and grandmother never learned to drive, my dad rode the Harrisburg bus to town to work and grandpa drove the car (the big black Chevrolet sedan that he later sold for $25) to his carpenter job. I had to walk to school and back every day. I started school in the first grade since the Houston public schools did not have free kindergarten at the time and Briscoe did not have the program. I was six and one-half when I started since my birthday was in February so I couldn’t start until the following September. School never started until after Labor Day back then.

There were sidewalks that I could use all the way to school, but about midway between home and school I had to cross the very busy 75^th Street. There was a crossing guard there who sat in his car at the crosswalk every morning. He wouldn’t let anyone cross until a certain time. On cold, wintery days when I got there too early, I would sit in the car with him and we would talk until time for me to cross. After crossing I would walk through another neighborhood to school. Sometimes I would stop at Arley Jennings house, a classmate of mine and he would walk the rest of the way with me. Funny thing, in the sixth grade Arley and I reached puberty before any of the other boys when we were eleven years old. We were a lot taller and stronger than anyone else in our grade. We were always the first two to be chosen on the softball teams during recess because we could hit the ball farther than any of the other kids. Recess was our only P.E. class, and we played several other games throughout the year.

There was a little grocery store on the corner of Capital Street and 75^th Street close to home called the “Little Super.” I would stop by there on my way back from school to get candy and if I had enough money, I would buy a chopped bar-b-q sandwich. It was the best that I ate until later eating at Steve’s Bar-B-Q in downtown Houston. The Little Super also sold firecrackers twice a year. You could even buy cherry bombs there!

One of my favorite memories at school was the annual May Fete celebration. All the kids would dress up in costumes, girls in the same pattern dresses and boys in white shirts and black vests or scarves. The vests had to be hand-made, so mine had to be made by a seamstress since my mother didn’t sew.

I went through grades one through six at Briscoe. One of my memories was in Miss East’s low first grade is that we all sat in little chairs lined up in the room. She had a little bell on her desk that she would ring for us to be quiet and pay attention. It was also in her class that I remember being in a little circle reading group, reading from a Dick and Jane book when suddenly, words had meaning! It seemed like an instant revelation to me. From then on reading was very easy. The words popped out of the page. (Spelling was another thing!) I also remember the big oak tree that you could see out the window. That was where we would go to play at recess.

In the high first grade (there were highs, the fall semester and lows, the spring semester in all the grades through high school). Miss South, our high first grade teacher, raised silkworms in a wire box. Since there was a mulberry tree across the street from our house on Bedford Street, I would bring leaves for the caterpillars to eat. Lucky because mulberry leaves are the only thing that silkworms will eat! The other teachers that I had were Ms. Hood in second grade, Ms. Brown in third grade (where we all got a photo of a classmate, Darryl who accidently shot himself after slipping on a ladder getting a loaded shot gun down from his parent’s closet.)

My other teachers were Ms. Brown third grade, Ms. Cooper fourth grade, Ms. Dawson for a couple of months until she had to quit to have her baby then Ms. Wykoff took over in the fifth grade and Ms. Sluss in the sixth grade. Our principal was Ms. Baron. I used to go into her office to talk with her from time to time when I got to school early. (I showed her my coin collection and Confederate money.) There were no other professional personnel in our school, no librarian nor counselor. I remember a visiting school nurse coming from time to time.

Walking into the main building there was a large mural of Custer’s Last Stand showing the Indians shooting and scalping the soldiers of the 7^th Calvary. There was a cafetorium where we would eat lunch and have programs on the stage. I used to buy my lunch most of the time which cost fifty cents. I would bring a sack lunch from time to time, but I would rather buy the school lunch. It always came with milk which came out of a cooler that always smelled a little sour. The sixth-grade dance was held in the cafetorium before we graduated to go to junior high school. For several months before we would learn and practice different kinds of ballroom dancing. Each of us had a dance card that we got filled out by the different partners for each type of dance that we learned, the waltz, fox trot and polka. I always liked to dance with the girls!

In the sixth grade I was in the Safety Patrol. I wore a white belt with a shoulder strap that had a Safety Patrol badge on it. I would get out of class a few minutes before time for the first graders to catch the bus and hold a bamboo pole out in the street for the students to cross. I also would help them get on the correct school bus. (We didn’t have the yellow school busses, only leased city busses that would line up in front of the school at preassigned spaces.)

We also got little pins for donating to various causes. The Smoky Bear and Red Cross ones I remember. I guess if you didn’t have the ten cents and didn’t donate you couldn’t get a pin. This was probably a problem for the kids from poorer homes than mine. I also remember riding the special train from Houston to Austin twice to visit the state capitol. All of the elementary schools in the city were offered the trip once a year. We would get on the train arranged by school at the Houston Train Terminal Building downtown. We would go to Austin, tour the capitol building and then come back late in the evening. I remember eating tuna fish and pimento cheese sandwiches that they sold on the train.

There was a time that the Sabin polio vaccine (This was an oral vaccine; the Salk vaccine was administered by a shot in the arm that I also received from a doctor in town) was administered to all of the children in the school. There were long tables set up in the driveway in front of the school with little white cups with a sugar cube that had a pink spot on it. We lined up by grade and each of us got a sugar cube. Before that time many children were stricken by polio and no one knew what was causing it. I heard that it was carried in the water puddles that are so prevalent in Houston during the summer months. I never knew someone who had recovered from polio until I was tutored in algebra in junior high school. My tutor, I don’t remember his name, had had polio when he was younger and was in an iron lung. When he tutored me, he would sit in a chair with a contraption strapped to his chest which breathed in and out for him. He was a great tutor. He would sit and I would write on a flip chart as he told me how to solve the equations. I passed the algebra course with his help!

From the first grade on I would walk about four blocks down Forest Hill Blvd. to Harrisburg Boulevard to catch the bus to town after school. I would have to walk by the Sacred Heart Catholic School. I always wondered why those kids had to go to a different school than us and wear special uniforms. There was a pistachio nut machine in front of the icehouse (icehouses in Houston were like small neighborhood grocery stores, but adults could buy and drink beer there) by the bus stop and I would always get a nickel’s worth of the red colored pistachio nuts. I didn’t know until many years later that they were not naturally red. They were really cream colored and were dyed red!

I would ride the Harrisburg bus downtown to Main Street where my mother and grandmother would meet me on their weekly shopping trip. Grandma always had a wet face cloth wrapped in wax paper to clean me up before we shopped. Coming home the same bus was the Broadway bus so we had to be sure to catch the correct one. Downtown everyone dressed up and looked really nice, so me being clean meant a lot to grandma. I remember going into the ladies’ rest room in Battelstein’s department store. It was actually a big room in front of the toilets that had chairs and a sofa for the ladies to rest while shopping. We also used to eat at the Forum Cafeteria on some days during the summer when I would be with them all day. It was a two-story cafeteria and I liked to eat upstairs when we could. It was always tricky walking up the stairs with a tray of food. I always got salmon cakes and remember losing one of my teeth while eating one.

In the sixth grade a friend of mine in school owned a horse and kept it in a stable not far from the school. Sometimes we would go there after school, saddle up and ride down by the bayou. He would borrow a horse for me from someone he knew at the stables. One day my mother got a call at work (she worked downtown in the Humble Building in the Special Officers Department) that he had a horse in a trailer on the street and wondered where she wanted it taken. He said that I had ordered it but hadn’t told him where to take it. She said she didn’t authorize the purchase and to take it back from wherever he got it. She said she was pretty mad at me before being told it was a joke. I had been after her to buy me a horse and to keep it in the stable with my friend’s. She had told the guys in her office about it and they decided to play a trick on her. She worked with a bunch of men who had all been law enforcement officers from small towns and they all thought it would be a funny trick!

Chapter 7 - Living in Mason Park - Our First House

7703 Erath, Houston, Texas and our 1957 Chevrolet

When I was seven years old in 1950 we moved into a house of our own from my grandma and grandpas. It was not a big house by any means, but it was made affordable by the assistance of the federal government returning the favor to its native sons for giving up time in their lives to serve in the nation's military. At that point in time those in the United States living as a white, middle-class person could have living conditions that had never before been achieved by people in any society up to that time. The nation was to experience a prosperity and growth for the next forty years. This was the time of my Becoming!

In 1954 when I was in the sixth grade we moved from my grandma and grandpa’s house to our own in the Mason Park subdivision at 7703 Erath Street. We bought a brand-new house that I later found out was built by the construction company my grandpa worked for as a finishing carpenter. I found out later that our oak floors in the house were something special that he had put in just for us! It was a small GI Bill house, but it suited our needs. There was a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom. There was a built-in telephone nitch and clothes hamper in the hallway outside the bathroom. The bathroom did not have a shower, it but did have a tub next to the toilet. There was also a little built-in natural gas heater that was the only one in the entire house. It was enough for the three of us. There was also a nice back yard. The house was on a corner lot, so there was more room outside than most houses had. The side yard had several large oak trees with a sandy area where I used to play with toy soldiers and cowboys and Indians. There was also a tall pine tree in the back yard.

There were several friends from school that also lived within a few blocks from us. In fact, Ralph Kerr who was a classmate since the first grade met me when we drove up in a truck that we used to bring some of our things from the other house. Other neighbor boys were Robert Donnell, Frank Waltermire, Carl “Butch” Sims, Carl Smith, Eugene Freeman, Edward Holdridge, Douglas Paschal, and Roosevelt Lue. Roosevelt and Robert became special friends. We played together for many years. Roosevelt’s family originally came from a village outside of Canton, China. He had many brothers and sisters. Some of the boys were named after American presidents – Roosevelt, Lincoln, Franklin, Abraham, Wilson, Michael, Donald, Esther, and the others I didn’t know. His mother never learned to speak English. She was brought over to the U.S. by his father’s family to be married. Since she was from a village outside of Canton and the family spoke the Taishan dialect as did most of the Chinese families in Houston at the time. They all went to the Chinese Baptist Church in downtown. She would also not eat American food. Occasionally, she would get a couple big crates of goods from her in-laws who lived in San Francisco. I remember watching them being opened in their driveway. I was always astounded by some of the goods. Water bugs, candied ginger and salty plums were unusual for me. Lots of canned goods and sauces as well. She also farmed in their backyard growing winter and bitter melons on the fence, Chinese greens, and long green beans. They were also the only family to have air conditioning at the time other than Randy Hunt whose family were Jewish and owned the Kid’s Store in the strip shopping center on Lawndale Boulevard a few blocks from our house. Randy also had a pet flying squirrel in a cage in his bedroom which I though was unique. Since Randy’s family had more money than most of us, he attended the private Kincaid School downtown.


Roosevelt Lue	Roosevelt's family in San Francisco

Roosevelt and I rode my bike together. He didn’t have a bike, so we would take turns pumping each other around on my big Schwinn bike. One day we took a lunch (scrambled eggs and mayonnaise on white bread) and rode several miles across the Galveston freeway to where the new shopping center, Gulfgate Mall was being built. It was the second large shopping mall built in our part of town after Palm Center. It was also the first one to have all of the stores in an air-conditioned mall. The other shopping centers were all out-of-doors. After the sixth grade Roosevelt’s father had a heart attack and died. They owned a grocery store on Harrisburg Boulevard with his uncle. After he died the family moved back to San Francisco, California where they had lived before moving to Houston.

When I was a teenager my parents and I went on a car trip to California. I went to see Roosevelt in San Francisco’s Chinatown. His family owned an apartment building and a jewelry store. I ate supper with his family while I was there. They lived on the 6^th floor and there was no elevator. I remember while walking down the street in Chinatown with him, he told me to not walk beside him because his grandfather didn’t like for him to associate with “white kids.” He later became a mailman in East San Francisco and never left. I found out later that he had a psychological condition that he could not sleep outside of his own house. Needless to say, he never returned to Houston to visit. I did go to see him many years later while on a vacation and visited with his wife and kids.

Robert Donnell

My other best friend was Robert Donnell. We remained friends until we went to different colleges after high school. I went to Stephen F. Austin in Nacogdoches, Texas and he went to Sam Houston in Huntsville, Texas. After that we both worked at different Seven Eleven stores in the Houston area, but that is another story. We played together as kids, went to Mason Park which was two blocks from my house and across the street from his. He was one-half year older than me, so we were in two different grades. When I was in the low first grade, he was in high first and the gap remained the same all through school.

Ralph Kerr and me at the swimming pool

Living in Mason Park was also good because the park itself had a big swimming pool. Every day during the summer I would wake up, have breakfast and go over to the pool until it closed for the noon hour. That was where I learned to swim by myself. One time I was swimming underwater with my face mask on and another kid jumped on me forcing me to the bottom of the pool. The mask I was wearing had one big piece of glass in the front which broke on the bottom of the pool and I came up with a blooded face. Why they made it with glass and not plastic I don’t know? I was rushed to the Pineview Clinic on Harrisburg Blvd. and the pieces of glass were removed from my face. Thank goodness there was no permanent damage done! Mason Park also had various ball fields and open areas. We used to play touch football with other kids in the neighborhood and there was a Little League baseball team that would practice there. I was never much of a baseball player, but many of my friends were. Robert was an especially good catcher and was recruited by the Little League teams. He continued to play baseball into adulthood and even ran the concession stand at the baseball field in Smithville, Texas when he lived there with his family.

My mother started working when I was eleven years old. She got a secretarial school gift from her friend, Doris Lamberton. She attended Southwestern Business School in Houston. She received an award for being the fastest typist ever in the school. When she graduated, she got a job working for Humble Oil Company (ExxonMobil) as the first secretary in the Special Officers Department downtown. She wound up working there for 43 years. My dad, Lee worked for H.E. Bovay Consulting Engineers as a Mechanical Draftsman. Later he worked for Gulf Oil Company before he retired. He was leased to various businesses throughout his tenure at Bovay’s. He went to Richland, WA and Pampa, TX to work on secret government projects involving radioactive materials. He was also leased for one year to the Monsanto chemical plant in Texas City. As a special treat that year we ate out many evenings at the Piccadilly Cafeteria in the Gulfgate Mall. It was nice having the extra money that he made by commuting to Texas City.

It is funny the way you remember your friend’s parents:

-Robert’s mother, Wilma never stopped talking. His dad worked for the Southern Pacific railroad as a freight train conductor. I didn’t see him much because he was gone much of the time and when he was at home he was sleeping because he usually worked on the night shift. Sometimes we would go to see him while he was on the train at a “siding” before he would leave for another town.

-Frank’s dad we called “alki”. Every evening after work he would sit at the little porcelain kitchen table and drink beer. He never talked to us; he just drank his beers! His mom, Francis always wore a loose robe around the house with nothing on underneath. She would intentionally give us peeks at parts of her body from time to time. (She was overweight and wasn’t a very pretty woman!)

-Ralph’s mom, Beryl was Jewish and had one eye that always looked at her nose. His dad worked with his uncle at a car parts store and would bring him science fiction paperbacks from time to time. He loved to read them in the evenings!

-Carl’s dad was a ham radio operator. He had a really cool room in his house filled with radio gear and a big antenna outside in the backyard. His call number was “W5RPW.” We would hear him talking on our telephone from time to time since his signal was so strong.

-Roosevelt’s mother always stayed home. She never learned to speak English and really didn’t fit into the American culture very well. She dug up her whole back yard and planted Chinese vegetables in it. Every time I would go over to their house (they had air-conditioning and we didn’t) she would ask me in Taishan (the dialect they spoke) “Nay heck ja la?” which means “Have you eaten yet? It really was a greeting not a question. She always did, however have a big pot of some kind of soup on the stove. She also had dried squids hanging in the kitchen for the next soup I guess. His dad was always working at their grocery store on Harrisburg Boulevard, so I don’t remember him at all.

I was in the Cub and Boy Scouts. In elementary school we could wear our cub scout uniform to school on certain days of the week. I enjoyed being in the scouts. We would go on field trips, and I especially remember one to Mrs. Baird’s Bakery. I still remember the smell of the baking bread as well as the smell of the roasting coffee at the Folger’s Coffee Company on Harrisburg Blvd.

I was in the Boy Scouts for a short length of time. I got my 2^nd class badge but could never learn the Morris Code necessary to get the 1^st class one. Our troop went to Camp Strake outside of Conroe, Texas a couple of summers. One year we were kicked out of the camp after the officials found out that it was a couple in our troop who put cherry bombs in the outhouse making a real mess! I didn’t participate in that operation but was sent home anyway.

Chapter 8 - Pets

I had lots of pets growing up. I always liked animals of all kinds. I think the first one I had was a goldfish that I bought downtown at Woolworth’s and kept in a bowl in my bedroom. I also had many little turtles with pictures painted on their backs. I was given a white rabbit once while we lived with my grandma and grandpa. Although it was caged it didn’t last very long. I found a baby cottontail in the woods once and built a cage for it. I fed him milk with a doll bottle until he started eating rabbit food. He got scared one day, jumped, and hit his head on the roof of his cage. Throughout Jr. High and High School had many tanks of tropical fish. I raised fancy guppies, mollies, angels, and several types of gouramis. There were many other kinds kept together in my larger aquariums.

Every Easter I would get several painted chicks at Woolworth and raise them until they turned white after their first molt. They were always baby Leghorn roosters. I also raised two ducks that I released at the lake at Forest Park Cemetery to be with all the others there.

My grandpa and dad make me a cage with a glass front for my snake, Herman. He was a 6ft long Chicken Snake that I caught in the woods by my house. I never fed him live food, so I had to force feed him. I would hold his mouth open and put little balls of hamburger meat down his throat and push it down with the eraser end of a pencil. He got out of his cage one day when it was being cleaned and went into the street where the laundry man intentially ran over him. I also had a little hog nosed snake for a little while. I had a baby camen named Elvis that I gave to a pet shop when he got bigger because he would bite me when I put my hand in his cage.


Chingling	Snookie and Joe

I had a white cat named Snookie, a Cocker Spaniel named Sandy, a Pekingese named Chingling, a Peek-a-Poo and an Afghan Hound named Kush (for about two weeks). I had many kinds of birds as well. Throughout the years I had many parakeets (Australian Budgerigars). Funny, I always named them “Joe'" and they were always green. I would bring home cockatiels to tame for Mr. Kanka at the pet store and he would pay me in things for my fish tanks. I also tried to raise Lady Gouldians, Shafttails, Societies and Zebra Finches with varying success. I had a couple of parrots as well. Back then they were caught in the wild and sold for about $50. They each had to be hand tamed. My Mexican Double Yellow Head was always a little mean, but my Blue-Fronted Amazon was very tame and quick to learn any phrase that you wanted to teach him/her. You must remember when you have a parrot to be careful when you teach a phrase; they don’t ever forget or unlearn what they are taught!

Chapter 9 - Smithville, Texas

My favorite memories with Robert were visiting his grandparents in Smithville, Texas. Both sets of his grandparents were from there. Beginning at an early age I would go with him there during the summer and Thanksgiving vacation. His paternal grandparents lived on the highway coming in from La Grange across from the auction barn. There were always animals there to see. I mostly remember the pigs having sex. If you ever saw a pig screwing you would never forget it!

Robert's Grandparents House

His maternal grandparents lived in town on Gresham Street which was between the main highway and the railroad. Smithville is a railroad town which was the major stop for fuel, water, and maintenance for the steam trains. There were several tracks in town and a roundhouse to service the engines. Robert’s grandpa Mr. Cooper was a barber, and his barber shop was a room in the front of his house. You had to go out of the house and around to the shop to get in since the health department wouldn’t let it be directly connected to their home. When we were young, we would shoot grey lizards (we called them “rusty genies”) out of the trees with sling shots and China berries. One time I went to Smithville by myself on the Katy (MK&T) passenger train. I caught it at the train station under the M&M Building on Main Street in downtown Houston. I remember that it was not a smooth ride but was a lot of fun.

Spending so much time in Smithville taught me a lot about race relations. The town was populated by Anglos, African Americans, and Czechs. The Anglos ran most of the businesses and controlled the economy. The Czechs who had earlier lived in their own communities around central Texas (Kovar and Cistern) had moved into Smithville and owned several businesses there. In the generation before mine they were different from the Anglos in that they spoke Czech even though some were Bohemian and some were Moravian, they had different churches but were all Catholic. The Anglos were mainly made up of different types of protestants. Some of the long time Smithville Anglos had lived around Texas for a couple of generations and had negro slaves working the cotton plantations in the area before the Civil War. After the emancipation of the slaves, many of the slaves became sharecroppers for the local landowners. I remember driving into town from Houston and passing rows of little sharecropper houses where they lived with their families. (The Institute of Texan Cultures Museum in San Antonio has an example of one.)


Kovar Breathren Cemetery	Kovar Catholic Cemetery

The African Americans were always discriminated against. If they met a white person downtown on a sidewalk, they would stand aside to let them pass. All restaurants had separate entrances and tables for the black people. Even the theater downtown had two doors. After buying a ticket from the outside ticket agent the whites would walk straight into the theater while the black people had to take the door to the right which led directly upstairs to the balcony. They did not connect. There was no intermingling of the races. Black people and poorer whites lived on the other side of the railroad tracks from the main town. It was called “Bunny Town” not Bunte Addition as it was properly named.

I remember one time as a teenager riding in a car with some other Smithville teens wanting to buy a couple of six packs of beer. We drove up beside a black man who was walking on the side of the road. One of the boys in the back seat had a rifle on his lap and told the black man that we wanted him to get us some beer. He saw the rifle and got into the car with us. We drove him to the rear of a grocery store (remember he couldn’t go in the front door) gave him the money and told him what we wanted. He went in and bought a couple of six-packs for us and brought them back to the car. We took the beer and abruptly drove off, found a secluded road and stopped to drink our beer. I think we did give him one beer for his trouble!

Race relations were better with some of the other groups of people, especially with the Czechs. One night Robert and I went to a dance at the American Legion Hall. There was an “umpa” band playing and there were people there of all ages. (Of course, no blacks.) We danced a lot of waltzes, polkas, and two-steps that night. Once we all did a “Tom Jones” where the ladies hold hands walking in a circle and the men doing the same in an outer circle. The band would play and when it stopped you would dance with whomever was in front of you. I danced with a lot of women of all ages that night!

Sometimes Robert and I would go to the little town of Cistern. They also held dances in a hall by the Catholic church. (Czechs were Catholic and the Germans were Lutheran.) There was no air conditioning and there were wooden boards over the windows that would be raised up by ropes to let the air come into the room. They sold beer there to anyone who could put their quarter on the counter to be served. As teenagers we would go there for both the dancing and the beer!

I bought my third car from Smithville. Ernest Vacek had customized a 1933 Plymouth coupe. (My first car was a 1930 Chevrolet sedan that I never got to run after driving it home from a lot on Harrisburg Boulevard). The Plymouth coupe had a 1955 Plymouth motor and a floor stick shift that was put in upside down to make it work. I bought it for $500 and drove it back to Houston. It needed a lot of work, the back left fender needed body work, the entire interior needed to be re-upholstered, new wiring under the hood and a green paint job. It had regular tires and had been totally made into a hot rod. After I drove it to Houston, I had some body work done and a compete interior installed. I took it to a Mexican shop in Houston and had the seat, headliner, door panels and rear tire cover done in green and white Naugahyde. The body was painted green and I had a green #6-pool ball screwed on the shift gear handle. The back spare tire had a white tire cover and a pull-down shade on the back window with the words “Private” on it.

I didn’t meet many girls in all the time that I spent in Smithville. Once Robert got me a blind date with a German girl, June Kuhn. One Saturday night we all drove from Smithville to Bastrop about 20 miles away to go to a dance hall. It was in an old theater building where the seats had been removed. What I remember about it was that the floor was slanted, and it was hard to dance on. Robert introduced me as Sam and from that time on everyone in Smithville called me that, to this day even Robert does.

Another time that I took a girl to a prom was when Robert told me that a girl who used to visit her grandma in Smithville who lived in Houston wanted him to take her to her senior prom. He told her he didn’t like to dance, but that he knew someone who did, me. I called her (I think her name was Jere) and took her although I didn’t know her at all. It was fun dancing, but I never saw her again. I don’t know what she thought about the situation.

On another adventure when I was in Smithville, I went with several other boys to a spot outside of town where they had hidden a railroad workers’ flat car. It was night-time and we moved it onto the tracks on a hill outside of town. We pushed it down the tracks and all got on it as it gained speed toward the train yard. Before it got to the train yard, we all jumped off and watched it as it continued on. I doubt if anyone ever figured out how the flat car got there!

Chapter 10 - Early Car Trips

As highways were made easier to travel more and more Americans made annual car trips. We would usually plan a two-week car trip around July 4^th when my dad would get extra days off because of the holiday. In the summer of 1955 my grandma and grandpa Madden bought a new Chevrolet. We all went to Colorado to break it in. Me, grandma and grandpa in the back seat and my mom and dad in the front. We had to share the backseat with a big paper sack full of snacks that grandma thought was essential on a long trip. It was July and cars had no air conditioning at that time, so we began our trip at night when it was cooler. We drove from Houston to Amarillo the first night and got there right before dawn. Me, my dad, and grandpa slept outside in a little park downtown and grandma and my mom slept in the car. We drove to Raton, New Mexico the next day and spent the night in a $3 motel room. There were $3 and $6 rooms, but grandma never wanted to pay over $3. She would always go in first to inspect the beds and bathroom to make sure it was clean enough for us. We finally got to Colorado and drove around Denver and into the Rocky Mountains. I remember having a snowball fight at Berthod Pass in July!

A year later my mom, dad and I planned a trip to Los Angeles, California on Route 66. As we drove out of Albuquerque, probably around Grants, our used Studebaker stopped, and we had to be towed back to Albuquerque where we spent several days before driving back to Houston. At that time there were no ATMs and whatever money you took with you is what you had for the entire trip. Usually, it was $500 that was saved throughout the year.

On another vacation trip in another old Studebaker the car stopped dead outside of Comanche, Texas in a rainstorm. My dad got a ride to town and our car was towed to town. We stayed in a motel one night while it was being fixed but there were so many crickets in town that year that they would fly all around the room and pile up in the corners. The mechanic and his family invited us to stay with them until a part could be sent for and the car could be repaired. After a week in Comanche we went back to Houston without ever getting to our destination in Las Angeles. Another $500 spent on fixing the car instead of enjoying a vacation!

A trip that did go well was one to Acapulco, Mexico. We went in our new 1957 Chevrolet this time. We drove from Houston to Taxco, Acapulco, Mexico City and Monterrey before returning home. It was a very good trip with no car problems! I especially enjoyed climbing the steps at the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan and riding the boat in the Floating Gardens in Xochimilcan in Mexico City. I also remember while driving through the mountains, some kids would throw a live iguana tied onto a rope into the highway hoping we would stop and buy it from them. We didn’t!

Chapter 11 - Jackson Junior High School

I began the 7^th grade at Jackson Junior High School. Since we lived in a “split district” I was not assigned a particular set of Junior High/High Schools to attend. I could either choose to go to Edison Jr. High and Milby High or Jackson Jr. High and Austin High School. I chose the latter. Most of my friends were going to Jackson and Austin. Those schools were also easier to get to on the city bus, but I usually didn’t need to get to school that way. Roosevelt’s brother Wilson drove, and he would be our transportation for the first year. After that the dad of one of the girls down the street, Sandy Johnson, would take us to school in his panel truck. There was always someone around who would take us to school.

The years in junior high were pretty uneventful for me. I played on the football team in the 7^th grade as right guard #66, but since I wore glasses (there were no contact lens then) I couldn’t see very well without them. The fall is also ragweed season and I sneezed and had watery eyes every day. Football playing was out for me before the football season was over. I was on the swimming team for a couple of years though. We went to several other schools for swim meets in the afternoons. I was a pretty good swimmer, but not one of the best.

Swimming in both Jr. High and High School was interesting in those days. The pool in both schools was in the basement below the gym. Each semester we had six weeks of swimming instruction. For some reason the boys could not wear bathing suits, but the girls did. Of course, we had our classes separate! I felt very vulnerable when we played water polo and it was always a sight when we bounced on the diving board before diving into the water. Occasionally, someone would get a “stiffy” and we would all laugh at him! You know how boys are!

I had my first real girlfriend, Maureen Lanier in the 7^th grade. We were in some of the same classes. We traded a one-half heart shape necklace medallion to show everyone that we were going steady. She lived on Alto Street about eight blocks from school and I would sometimes walk her home after school. I had to ride the 75^th street bus home when I did. I would catch the bus on Polk Street in front of Jackson Junior High. The bus came within two blocks from our house. It was the Westheimer bus going to town and the 75^th street bus coming back.

Maureen and I would go to the drive-in movies sometimes without her parents knowing and would smooch during the show. We also would go “park” next to the fountain at the entrance of the Lawndale Cemetery. The fountain was lit up every night with lights that changed color. I could take the family car on a date once a week. My parents had bought a brand new black 1957 Chevrolet. It had a black and red interior, fender skirts and spinner wheel caps. Beautiful and cool! When I was 14 years old, I got my driver’s license a month before the legal age changed to 16. That was pretty young to be able to drive on my own, but I was a careful driver and never had an accident with the car.

Maureen and I split up by the 8^th grade. She and her family moved to Pasadena, Texas and I didn’t hear from her again until she contacted me when we were both in the 12^th grade. She called me and asked me if I would take her to her senior prom. I was surprised to hear from her, but I told her that I would. I had not seen her since she moved away and was shocked to see her again. She was no longer the cute 7^th grader that I remembered! We had a good time and that was the last that I ever heard from her. I don’t think she wanted to start up a relationship again either.

Maureen Lanier

After that I had a couple of other girlfriends. One time I met a girl who lived close to downtown in a subdivision close to Harrisburg Blvd. I took her to a dance at the Ripley House. We had a great time, but even though she was a really cute Italian girl she lived too far away for me to seriously date. Another was Barbara Buzon. She and I went to the same school although she was a year younger than me. One time we were asked to leave a dance in the gym of Mt. Carmel Catholic High School because we were dancing too close to each other. She abruptly cut our friendship out when she developed Bell’s Palsy paralysis in one side of her face. She eventually got over it, but we were not dating anymore.

One night in Junior High several of us, Frank Waltemire, Dennis Medley, and I went with Billy McBay in his family’s new 1957 black Lincoln town car to where they were building the new Hartman Junior High School. We took a gallon can of gasoline with us. Frank and Dennis took the gasoline and wrote a big “JJH” (Jackson Junior High) on the front lawn and lit it. Frank was standing in it when it went up into flames. They barely made it back to the car before it was a roaring fire. It did no damage except writing the letters on the lawn. The school was being built in the Garden Villas Subdivision to relieve the pressure on Jackson and Deade Junior Highs. We never got caught and no one ever knew who did it!

Many times, Robert, Frank, and I would take Westheimer bus downtown then the Main Street one out to Herman Park. There were stables there were riding horses could be rented by the hour. We would pay our money and be assigned a horse. After a lot of coaxing the horse would take off on one of the designated trails. The horses were really easy to ride because they all knew to stay on the trail and how get back to the barn for food!

My trips to Garner State Park began while I was in the 8^th grade. This was continued for the next 6 years. Six of us borrowed Frank Waltimire’s dad’s 1950 Ford and drove to Garner State Park in the Texas Hill Country. We stayed there about a week camping out under the trees. We didn’t have a tent. At that time you could pull your car up anywhere in the park to camp. There were no assigned camp sites. Every morning a park ranger would grab someone by the toe to wake them up to pay the $5 camping fee. We swam in the Rio Frio River, climbed Old Baldy Mountain, and walked across the river dam to the other side. (Very slippery!) A couple of the guys even drove down to Villa Acuna, Mexico to enjoy the Mexican hospitality. I didn’t go!

One year on another trip to Garner with Gerald Elston and Frank Biehunko we went across the river to hunt rabbits for supper. We had run out of food that we brought from home. A guy across the river who had a jeep and rifles took us around and we shot three rabbits. When we got them back across the river and to our campsite to prepare them for supper, we were surprised to see that they were full of bots. The bot grubs began breaking out of their skin and we had to throw them away! I don’t remember what we ate after that. My mom and dad joined us the next weekend and we ate very well after that!

One thing I did do in Garner was to learn to dance Country/Western style. There was a pavilion on the river with a big concrete outdoor dance floor and a jute box in a wooden cabinet. Every night the cabinet was opened up and we all put our quarters in the jute box. I especially remember “Black Land Farmer” being played over and over. We learned to do the Texas Two-Step from the girls from Baytown. They were good dancers and were more than happy to teach us how to dance. We went counterclockwise around the dance floor taking long steps! The park rangers would close the wooden box at 11:00 p.m. while the last song was playing. After that we would walk through the woods back to our campsites. On night some girls from another campsite came to visit us, but they didn’t stay long.

Later on that year several of us drove to Baytown on a Saturday night and went to the Quack Shack (named after the Baytown High School Ganders) where all the teenagers hung out. When we were leaving we almost got into a fight with some of the local guys in the parking lot who didn’t appreciate us dancing with their girls. We never did go back!

Sometimes during the summer, I would go to Crystal Pool on South Main Street. What I remember about that is that there was a plastic airplane bomber window chained to the bottom of the 15ft. part. You could hold your breath and swim down to get under it where an air hose constantly pumped air into the dome. Sometimes it got a little crowded and you would have to come up before you wanted to.

Playland Park was also out on South Main Street. From time to time I would go out there for the rides and concessions. There was a large wooden roller coaster that I loved to ride. It was a long one with one side going out and another coming back. There were all sorts of booths where you could throw things and win stuffed toy prizes. I was never any good at winning the prizes. Once I took Grandpa Madden there to see if he liked it. He and I rode the Tiltawhirl and he almost fainted. A real scare for me! He did win a stuffed toy when one of the “carnes” couldn’t guess his correct age. He always looked younger than he was when he got to be an old man. He was a little guy with big muscles from a lifetime of hard work.

Chapter 12 - Rockport, Texas

My mother’s relatives were from the lower Texas gulf coast around Rockport. Her great grandparents on the Madden side of the family, Dr. James Frederic Madden and his wife Mary “Eveline” Bludworth were from there as well. The Maddens had moved there with their family from Rapides, Louisiana a year before the Civil War broke out in 1860. as a pharmacist/physician looking for a fresh start. He voted to join the confederacy and became a part of the Indianola Home Guard. All of their relatives stayed around the area until my grandma and grandpa moved to Houston. Many cousins still live around there.


Dr. James Fredric Madden	Eveline Bloodworth Madden

For many years Rockport, Texas was our family vacation spot. Since we didn’t own a car when I was young, we would take the Greyhound bus from Houston to Rockport. My dad liked to fish in the Gulf, so he would take his fishing rods, etc. on the bus. We would usually stay there a week and stay in a big two-story white clapboard motel across from the Turning Basin. Lee would get up before dawn, go to the café down the street for breakfast and walk out on the Rockport jetty to catch speckled trout. Sometimes I would join him. I Many times, we would only catch hard-head and gaff top catfish and have to throw them back. Back then only the Black folks would eat those varieties.

Early on we would stay at my great aunt Clara and uncle Arthur Davis’ (grandma’s brother’s) house in Fulton Beach which was only a couple of miles from Rockport. They lived a block from the gulf and had access to a pier that we would fish for speckled trout and catch crabs. All of grandma and grandpa’s families were originally from the Texas gulf coast. Grandpa was born in Saluria, Texas (a town that no longer exists) on Matagorda Island and grandma in Fulton. They met there when grandma was 19 and grandpa was 24 years old. Grandma’s nickname was “Blackie” when she was a young girl because she like to stay out in the sun so much. Grandpa became a sail boat builder and one of his trips was down the coast to Galveston Island and up the Houston Ship Channel. Even my mother’s older brother, Preston was born in Rockport. Grandpa later continued being a carpenter when they moved from Rockport to Houston.

I have made many trips to Rockport through the years with the different families that I have had. At one time in the 1980’s and ‘90s there were a lot of nice vacation homes build by people from all over Texas. In 2017 the town was almost wiped out by Hurricane Harvey. That wasn’t the only one they had ever had. Rockport and Fulton Beach have had many devastating storms in the past. Grandma told me about one that came when she was a girl. She and one of her sisters floated in the high water out of their house on a mattress! The fact is that many of my ancestors (great grandpa Dr. James Frederic Madden, several great-great uncles and great uncle Willie Madden) were all killed by hurricanes that hit the Texas gulf coast in the past.

Me and Grandpa going to Willie's cabin

Uncle Willie’s story is unique. He lived in a tiny cabin that he built on the little island across the intracoastal waterway from Port O’Conner. Over a month after the hurricane Carla made landfall in 1961, a rancher from the La Salle Ranch found Uncle Willie’s body about five miles from Port O’Connor. Willie had been washed up in a grove of scrub live oaks and he had a big gash on his forehead. His skiff was found about a mile away from his body. Willie had chosen to stay when most others evacuated. Realizing that he was not going to survive the hurricane on his little island, he dressed in his hip boots, got in his skiff and put out a sea anchor. No doubt he was hoping he could ride above the waves to safety. It was not to be. Some thought Willie’s plan worked. But the gash on his forehead indicated that he was hit hard with some debris which was the probable cause his demise. When Uncle Willie was found he had $2,000 sewed into his pants. This money was later used for his burial in the Seadrift Cemetery. The date of September 11,1961 was used as the date of death.

Chapter 13 - High School Days

I went to Stephen F. Austin High School in Houston, Texas. My mother had gone there the first year it opened. Believe it or not there were still teachers there when I went that were there during her time there! Ms. Greenhill, Ms. Sadie McLain, and Ms. Lytle. By the time I went to high school I had my own car. It was the one that I bought in Smithville, the 1933 Plymouth coupe with a 1955 Plymouth motor. I had that car until my second year of college when I traded it with my roommate Douglas (Mack) Smith for a yellow 1953 yellow and white Chevrolet. Unfortunately, he had to sell my Plymouth during the year to pay a lawyer for a rape case that he had been charged with. He was proven innocent, but he didn’t get the car back.

I used to enjoy dancing every Saturday night when I was sixteen. The Civitan Club of Houston would hold a dance for teenagers in the gym in Mason Park a couple of blocks from my house every weekend, the Civitan Teen Canteen. I would walk over to the park and pay to go in. Once you went in you couldn’t leave. It was a way to keep tabs on young teenagers. I loved to dance with the girls and didn’t stop until the dance was over. That is where I met my wife to be, Linda Lambert. She was fourteen at the time. She was a pretty girl and a great dancer, so I looked forward to Saturday nights. I had learned to dance when I was thirteen. The girls down the street, Fannie Ames, Sandy Johnson, and Kay White taught me how to do several new steps. We would go to Fannie’s house and dance after school. I was the only boy who wanted to learn, so I got plenty of attention!

Ken and Linda at Linda's HS Prom-1963

Dancing has been an asset for me all of my life. I found out later in life if you were a guy who liked to dance there were always more women than men who wanted to dance. Later on when I was single, I would go to a dance hall, get a beer, sit at a table, watch the dance floor, see a woman dancing and who would go back to a table of other women. I would go ask her to dance (two-step or waltz) and usually she would tell me that her friends also liked to dance - that was the night!

In the summers when I was in high school, I would go to Teen Hall during the day to swim. I would always eat chopped beef Bar BQ sandwiches there and lay out in the sun all day. I am sure that contributed to all the treatments that I later had on my skin for pre-skin cancers. Sometimes I would drive there in the evenings for the dances that were held there as well.

In high school I was not in the most popular group, but I knew everyone and was always friendly. I went steady with Linda during high school, so she was the only girl that I dated during that time. Before she got to Austin two years after I began there, I dated some other girls, but none in particular. Barbara Buzon and Sarah Jordan were two that I took dancing. I was always an average student and was happy most of the time. I studied enough to get by, but not so much that I got stressed about it. Cs were always good enough for me!

Barbara Buzon and I at the Bronco Whirl at Sylvan Beach

Sarah Jordan at Sr. Picnic

I was the manager of the track team for two years, so that was my P.E. experience. I was also in Vocational Agriculture for two years as well. I raised pens of broiler chickens for the FFA Livestock Fair and in fact bought my first car, a 1930 Chevrolet sedan with $100 of the proceeds. That car didn’t work out, never got it running very well, so I bought the 1933 Plymouth in Smithville. I didn’t smoke at the time, but like so many of the FFA guys I chewed Beech-Nut tobacco. We would go out to the Ag Farm every day during class before the Ag show to take care of the animals that students kept there. We had 2½ class periods for Ag since it was always scheduled at 4^th period during lunch time, so we had plenty of time away from school.

A pen of chickens for the Ag show numbered five. Since I raised about 20 to get the best five, I had to deal with the leftovers. I went around the neighborhood after the show selling them for $5 each. I had to learn how to kill and dress them for sale. I used a 2X4 with two nails in it to hold and stretch their neck while I cut off their head with a hatchet. I next would throw them into a garbage can and quickly put on the lid to keep them from spraying blood all over the place. I would have to pluck and dress them before delivery. It was really not worth $5 for me!

Joining the FFA club was really strange. All of the new initiates showed up at the Ag shack behind the school one evening. We were all taken into the building, blindfolded, and had to strip to our underwear. We went from station to station which were each manned by FFA students and Mr. Wright our teacher. At one station we sat in a chair and was told that anyone who wanted to donate to the FFA chapter stand up. The seat of the chair had been laced with wire attached to an electric hand generator. Me and I am sure everyone else who sat in that chair got an electric shock and immediately stood up. At another station someone rubbed sardine juice on my balls. Something that felt like sandpaper was applied and we were told that it was a hungry racoon and to be very still or we would be really sorry. I passed like everyone else, but never forgot that night! I am sure no one in the Houston Public Schools knew about what we had been through! Sometimes I wonder about Mr. Wright!

I also received some metals of accomplishment in FFA. On some days Mr. Wright would pitch a handful out to us in class. Whichever ones you caught you could keep and put on your FFA jacket. We never knew what it took to really earn them. I also had a single shot 22 caliber rifle given to me at school one day. I sold the most Farm and Ranch magazines for our club, so the rifle was my prize. I don’t remember how I got it home that day, since ag class was at 3^rd and 4^th periods. Probably not on the bus!

Another memory in high school was attending football games. I always really enjoyed watching the girls in the Scottish Brigade during the half-time performance. They would get on the field with the bagpipes and drums playing full blast. Once on the field there were dance groups doing the highland fling. Linda was in one of the dance companies. She was in company “A”. They were grouped according to their height. She was tall.

Scottish Brigade

I had a good friend in high school, Frank Biehunko. He was a big guy and played center on the football team. He and I did many things together. We even traded girlfriends one time after we went to a party at one of the girl’s houses in the Denver Harbor neighboorhood. My girlfriend was Judy Drummond and his was Kathy. Neither lasted very long. I did name a 1946 Plymouth, Judy, that I was driving after her.

One time I will never forget was when I went to Frank’s apartment to spend the night. His family was not very well off (his dad was a house painter, and his mom took care of his little brothers). They lived in a rundown apartment building in a rough part of Houston close to the ship channel. He lived there with his mom, dad and two little brothers. When I got to his apartment we had supper, talked, and eventually went to sleep (I was to sleep on the couch, since the place was pretty crowded). The toilet for everyone on that floor was at the end of the hall and I was told if I had to pee in the night to do it in the shower.

After supper his dad left to go to a bar down the street. Sometime in the middle of the night I was awakened by a lot of noise in the apartment. When I woke up, I saw his dad standing in the kitchen holding a butcher knife and screaming that he was going to kill everyone with it. I was really scared, since I had never experienced someone that drunk and out of control before. Frank’s mom talked him into going back downstairs to go get another sixpack of beer, so he left promising to come back soon and finish the task. Right after that we were sure he was out of the building we all escaped out the window, down the fire escape and into my car. I took his mom and brothers to his aunt’s house and Frank and I went to my house.

Frank stayed with me for a couple of weeks after that and finally spent the rest of the school year down the street at Robert’s house. That was at the end of our eleventh grade. Frank didn’t return to school after that. He later got married to his high school sweetheart Barbara, worked as a machinist, and had some kids. A few years later, he got really sick and Barbara called me and told me that he wanted to see me. I went to his house and we talked. He knew he was dying. Not long after that he died. He was the first friend of mine to pass away.

Chapter 14 - Stephen F. Austin State College

I decided in my senior year to go to Stephen F. Austin State College in Nacogdoches, Texas. I had decided that I wanted to be a veterinarian and Stephen F. had a good pre-vet curriculum. I was planning to go there for two years then to transfer to Texas A&M, the only vet school in Texas. Only 68 new students were accepted there each year. One day in high school I drove from Houston to Nacogdoches (about a 2 1/2-hour drive on Hwy. 45) to go to the orientation there. I went by myself in the family’s 1957 Chevy. I had a good drive there, enjoyed the orientation and decided to apply. I took the ACT test and was accepted for the fall class of 1961.

I drove to Nacogdoches in September before classes began. Linda and her mom and dad went as well, since they were going to stay outside of Chireno, Texas at Linda’s grandma, “Big Momma’s” house in the country. (Later when Linda came to attend SFA we would go to see her and spend the day with her on Sundays.)

On the way to Chireno where we were to spend the night, a meteor came across the night sky and lit it up like daylight. It was seen all over the southern part of Texas. Another event that happened the next day on the coast was Hurricane Carla a category 5 hurricane. It came ashore directly at Port O’Conner, Texas. That is where my great uncle Willie Madden, grandpa’s brother, was swept up with a 23 ft. surge tide and found a week later hanging in a tree!

I was assigned a room in Unit 2 at SFA. (At the time there were only Units 1, 2, 3, Ferguson and Wisely Halls available for boys.) My roommate was Carl “Butch” Sims. We had gone to school together in Houston and lived in the same neighborhood. We got along well but were in different crowds. The first day a bunch of upper classmen who lived in Unit 1 and who were also in the Sawyers Fraternity (later the Delta Sigma Phi Fraternity), took us to a room and shaved off most of our hair leaving a few patches here and there. We were then told to go to the college store and buy a SFA purple and white beanie. We had to wear it every day until the homecoming game in October. If SFA won we wouldn’t have to wear it anymore, but if they lost the game, we had to wear it until Christmas. Thank goodness we won the game! By then I had shaved my head so that I had no hair at all. When other guy’s hair started growing back mine never did to any extent. I guess I was going bald then anyway, since all the men on my mother’s side of the family were bald as well.

Judy Andersen

It was there that I met the cutest girl! Her name was Judy Andersen from Galveston. She was a pre-med student and had trained at the John Sealy Hospital in Galveston during high school. I first saw her on the first day in Freshmen Orientation Class in the auditorium. She came in late and sat in the row in front of me. A few days later I asked her out and she said yes. We went to movies and would spend some evenings parking in my car on old North Church Road. We went out most weekends, at SFA the girls had to be in at 10 o’clock on weekdays and 12 o’clock on Friday and Saturday nights.

By the Christmas holidays we had been going together for four months. I would come back to Houston once a month to visit during that time and was still dating Linda. Before the holidays, Judy told me that either I could continue going with her or Linda, but I had to make up my mind by the time that we returned from the Christmas break. We were getting pretty serious, and she was even planning how we would be able to get married, go to school and work at the same time.

I went to visit her and her family for a couple of days during the Christmas break. It was a good visit, but I had decided that I didn’t want to get serious that soon. There were too many unknowns. When we returned to SFA after Christmas I told her that I had decided to stay with Linda. We broke up! I have often wondered what my life would have been like had I decided to stay with her and gotten married during my second year of college. I am sure Vietnam would have been my destination before long after finishing college. There are times in one’s life that alter the future. That was a major one of mine!

For the next couple of years at SFA I stayed busy. Judy did not return to SFA after our Freshman year, and we didn’t keep in touch. I pledged Pi Kappa Alpha and Alpha Phi Omega fraternities in the spring. Most of my college activities from then on were associated with the brothers of the fraternities. PiKA was a national social fraternity that had been the Lambda Gamma local fraternity and APO was a national service fraternity. It was no wonder that I was on scholastic probation twice. Both times I got off by studying more!

Pi Kappa Alpha Spring 1962 Pledge Class

I went to lots of parties at various fraternity members houses (The Castle on North Street) and special ones put on for various occasions. One of the annual ones was the Viking Party. We would build a Viking ship on the back of a large trailer. Everyone would dress up like a Viking. We would pick up our dates at each dorm and take the “ship” to Bro. Mike Price’s family farm outside of town. The pledges would have spent the day digging a pit and roasting chickens on a wire frame. We would play Viking games involving us and our dates and have a couple of kegs of beer that were brought from the Budweiser outlet in Longview in a rented U-Haul trailer. (You couldn’t buy beer in Nacogdoches County!)

After my 21^st birthday I celebrated at Clyde and Bernie’s place in Apple Springs. It was really just a bar where you could go to have a beer or two. I got a free 25 cent beer when I told them why I was there. Listened to “The Race is On” while I drank my beer. I always liked that song! Apple Springs is not really a town. It is across the Trinity River going west out of Lufkin. Trinity County at the time was the closest county to Nacogdoches County that was not “dry.” You could get a beer there in one of the several cafes that were just across the county line. After my beer there I went across the street to a real café and ordered a smothered chicken fried steak with French fries. The steak was smothered in white gravy and was so big it hung off the plate on both sides! Another thing about Clyde and Bernie’s was that they served boiled shrimp in season. You always had to be careful driving back to Nacogdoches since the Liquor Control Board (LCB) cops would be on the road looking for bootleggers. You could always get booze from a bootlegger out of Trinity County. You just needed to know who to ask. Prices were a little steep though. After all they were risking getting caught. It was illegal to bring more than a case of beer or a couple of bottles of booze into the “dry” counties of Lufkin or Nacogdoches. Any more than that and you were considered a bootlegger.

I dated some in Nacogdoches at SFA but went to Houston more and more to see Linda. I had a 2-S military deferment throughout college during the Vietnam War, so I didn’t have to worry about being drafted during that time.

One time Bro. Jimmy Newell and I were caught by all the PiKA pledges and taken to the woods close to the Sabine River. We were blindfolded and let out on a road that used to be a logging railroad. It was pitch black when we were left there. We walked several miles and finally found a farmhouse. We walked up and asked if they had a phone, which they didn’t. They said we could spend the night in an old car parked in front of the house and gave us blankets that smelled like smoke from their fireplace. In the morning when we could see we walked to the nearest highway, caught a ride to the nearest gas station and called another brother to come pick us up. What a night!

Another time several of the brothers and I went to someone’s lake house. We had a truck load of beer from Longview and arrived late in the evening. We made a fire and sat around it talking, joking and drinking beer. It wasn’t long and some of the brothers started screaming that they had just been stung. I was wresting with one of the brothers and began to get stung as well. Before long I had been stung about 12 times. I began to convulse and was put into Bill Ferguson’s car to be taken to the hospital in Nacogdoches with a couple of others who had also been stung. I threw up on his floorboard on the way. When we got to the hospital I was taken by wheelchair and given several antivenom shots. The doctors decided that I should stay there for the night under close observation. What a night! During the next week several of the brothers went back and found that we had disturbed a ground hornet’s nest!

I remember a couple of girls in particular that I took out. One was Lynn Blubaugh. She and I were in the same comparative vertebrate anatomy class and had an evening lab once a week. She was a cute German girl with cooked teeth and an extra finger on one hand. One night I asked her if she wanted to go to the Nacogdoches airport to see the airplanes. She said she would. Of course, when we got there, it was pitch black on the road around the airport. We smooched a little and she told me if we didn’t stop then she would not be able to control herself. I took that as a hint that she wanted to go back to town. We did and to this day I don’t know if it was that she wanted to go back to town or that she was telling me that she wanted more. I’ll never know!

Another time I dated another girl from one of my classes. I don’t remember her name. She lived with her parents outside of town and she told me how to get there to pick her up for the date. Her house was down two dirt roads from the highway out in the country. I picked her up, we went to the movies and I took her home. I had met her parents when I picked her up. They were really rural! She lived in an old dog-trot house that looked like something that you would imagine in the hills of Arkansas! Just like the old Snuffy Smith cartoon. When I drove her home, I stopped in front of her house and turned off the car’s headlights. It was so dark I couldn’t even see her sitting in the front seat beside me! I have never been in that much darkness before (except on my fraternity walk) or since! That was our first and last date. At that point I realized that her motive for going to college was to get married and get out of the woods. She was cute, but it wasn’t to be with me!

During my second year I lived in Wisely Hall with a high school friend, Douglas “Mac” Smith. I traded cars with him (my 1933 Plymouth for his 1953 Chevy). He got into trouble with the law and had to sell the Plymouth to pay lawyer fees. The third year I moved off campus and lived in a rented house with Gary Evers, Randy Dawson, and Charles McIntyre on Pecan Street. Charles was the oldest of us (21 at the time and considered an adult) and he signed for us to live off campus. The next year we moved to another house on Hackberry Street. Randy didn’t come, so another fraternity brother, Carl Marshal moved in. He was an interesting guy. He had one hand and part of an arm removed from an accident with a meat grinder in his dad’s butcher shop as a kid and had a hook for one of his hands. He was a moody guy. He could however, pick up a hot crucible in chemistry class which no one else could do!

Like most college guys money and food was always an issue. We solved our protein problem in a coupe of ways. There was an egg processing plant not far from our house and we would go there to buy double yolked eggs. They always gave you more for your buck than regular eggs. We also figured out how to have fried chicken more often than not. Nacogdoches county was know for having lots of poultry production. Chickens in particular. We built a wire cage in the back of our house for a specific purpose. We had noticed that late at night trucks loaded with chicken cages would drive down North Street. We decided to take advantage of that knowledge. We would drive behind a loaded truck. When I stopped for a red light, one of us would get out and grab a chicken that had gotten out of its cage and was sittiing on the bed of the truck. The chicken would be thrown into the car and we would wait for the next red light and grab another. Randy's gravy was alway great with those chickens!

Another chicken story. One of us had discovered that a resident not far from us kept chickens in their back yard. Randy, Gary and I drove up to the fence where the chickens were kept. Gary jumped the fence and handed me three chickens, one by one. We went home and put the chickens in our cage. The next morning one of the chickens woke us up crowing. We killed and ate the two hens and the next night took the rooster back and threw him back over the fence. I have often wondered what the people thought when they found three of their chickens missing one morrning and the next day the rooster had returned!

I was lucky that I didn’t have to work during my college days. At that time tuition was less than $5,000 per year. My mom had gone to work and the money that she made would put me through college. She also let me use her Humble Oil employees credit card for gas money and sent me $40 every two weeks. Believe it or not it was plenty for me at the time. Gasoline was 35 cents a gallon and food was cheap. Sometimes money would get a little tight by the end of the two-week period and I would go to the City Café and eat a bowl of grits with hot rolls for supper. (I would sit in the back of the café and take the rolls out of the warming drawer where they were stored.)

I did work during the summers when I was home from school. The first job that I had was with Oshan Demolishing Company. To get the job I had to take a lie detector test to make sure that I had not stolen from another company before. Of course, I passed and went to the building demolition job early the next morning. When I got there, I was assigned to the roof demolishers. It was mid-summer and really hot. Two of us would cut off pieces of tar paper and throw them three stories down into a dumpster. About 10:00 or so I got thirsty and went to the water container on the roof. The foreman told me I couldn’t stop work then to get a drink and he would tell me when I could. Later that day I did get a drink, ate my lunch and never returned!

I did successfully work during the summers and Christmas holidays for the Seven Eleven stores. After training I worked at three different stores during the times that the regular employees were off each week. I worked the 3p.m.-11:00p.m. shift at the store on Graustark St; the 3-11 shift at the store on Scott Street and the 11:00p.m.-7a.m. shift at the store on Mykawa Road. I worked alone at each of these stores. At the time some stores were one person stores and others were two person stores. Each one has a story.

The Scott Street store was in the middle of the Black neighborhood close to the University of Houston and Texas Southern University, a Black university. When I started working there the worker that I was replacing told me that the guy that worked that shift before me was held up at gun point, robbed and taken out through the woods next door. The two black men that held him up kept arguing which one would get to shoot him. Hearing that he took off and ran away as fast as he could. He was not shot. He quit and that is why I got the job. One of the jobs for the clerk at the end of the shift is to count the money in the register (You couldn’t have more than $100 cash, the rest was put into a safe in the floor from time to time to be picked up by a supervisor the next day), sweep and wet mop the floor, arrange the contents in the cooler, straighten the packages and cans on the racks and then go out the back door and set the alarm. Needless to say, every night I worked there I had goose pimples on the back of my neck when I was leaving in the dark! There was only a single bulb at the back door for illumination.

The store on Mykawa Road was out in the country on a road by a railroad track. I always worked the “graveyard” shift there from 11 at night until 7 in the morning. The surroundings were always pitch black. I found out that after about 3a.m. no one came until around 4:30 when papers were delivered, and a few people would come in who had early jobs. Even from after midnight very few ever came in. This gave me a lot of time to tidy up the store. One morning driving home I was startled when a grey cat jumped from my backseat up to the front. I had left one of my car windows down while I was working and she had jumped in. I was going to be going back to Nacogdoches in a couple of days, so took the cat with me. A few weeks later the cat had five kittens. Two were grey like her, two were tabby and one was solid black. We enjoyed keeping them until they were weaned and then gave all of them and the mother away to good homes in Nacogdoches.

The other store where I worked was in the Montrose area of Houston on Graustark Street. It was across and down the street from a lot of apartments. It was in a real middle-class, white-collar neighborhood, very different from the other two stores. One evening one of the regular customers, Regina Delotte who had attended Austin Sr. High at the same time as I told me that she was an artist and asked if I wanted to see some of her paintings. She was one of those overweight girls who had a very beautiful face. She lived in an apartment a couple of blocks away. I told her I did and a few days later when she came in, I told her that I would come over after work. When I got there, she showed me her artwork and we each had a beer. When I left, I found that I had forgotten something at her place. I arranged another time to go pick it up. While I was there the situation got very friendly. After a couple of hours there was a knock on her door. She told me that she had forgotten that her boyfriend was coming to pick her up to take her to his apartment. She told me to get into the closet while he came inside. I did! What a scare! After they had left and the coast was clear I went down the back stairs and drove home. From that time on I only saw her when she came into the store and we would just say “hi.”

Robert Donnell and I both worked for Seven Eleven stores. In fact, he was the one that told me about the job to begin with. When I was training we would both get off late at night many times, he would get two quarts of beer from the cooler before going home. I would meet him and be his driver while he would drink the beers. Many times we would pick up his German Shepard, Shane, and we would drive to the area around the Houston ship channel. If we saw a drunk on the street Robert would tell Shane to get him. Shane would jump out of the car window and take off after whoever was there. About half-way to the person Robert would call him back and he would come back and jump back into the car. We would also play the same trick on the gay guys who hung out at the Greyhound Bus Station. Robert would go in and be the “bait” and I would stay in the car with Shane. When they would walk out Robert would call Shane and out the window he would come running. Thinking back, it was pretty cruel!

Shane was a beautiful German Shepard and Robert lent him out for stud service on several occasions. His price was the pick of the litter puppy. One time Robert asked me if I wanted to go with him to get the money owed him for one of the puppies. One night he and I went to a Black whore house down by the Houston Ship Channel where he was well known. He had sold the puppy to one of the whores there. We parked his car down the street and went in. When we went in one of the ladies welcomed us as if we were old friends. While we were there, I looked in one of the bedrooms and there was a big, black lady (“Big Edna”) and a customer having sex. What a sight!

Living close to the Houston Ship Channel had other perks. I remember going to the Athens Bar & Grill located close to there with my family. We would go there to get a good Greek meal and there would usually be Greek sailors to add to the festivities by doing Greek dancing along with the patrons. My friend Robert told me that he and a friend of his from Smithville named “Tiner” would cruise the area by the ship channel late at night and find drunk sailors who couldn’t get back to their ship. They would ask what ship it was and take them back in their car. It was usually profitable, since the other sailors from the ship were so happy to see that their shipmates were safe, they would pay them for their trouble. Not a bad venture if you were up for it!

In Nacogdoches I also worked for a man who was an insurance adjuster. He lived in Houston and had some cases In Nacogdoches. He hired me to check out some clients for insurance fraud. He would give me their names and addresses, and I would stake them out and check with their neighbors to see if they were actually too ill to go to work. I would watch their house to see if they were doing any outside work or if their neighbors knew of any activity that they were not supposed to be doing. After checking on them for a couple of weeks I would write a report and send It to Houston and collect my money.

In my sophomore year Linda came to SFA to study Elementary Education. We would eat on her meal ticket at the college since all girls who lived in the dorm had to buy a meal ticket and there was always extra food that she could get. We dated for the next two years in Nacogdoches. She became Fraternity Dream Girl one year and we always had a good time. I was to graduate at the end of 1965. I realized that when I graduated, I would lose my student deferment status. The U.S. was becoming more involved in the war in Vietnam. I decided to go another year and take education courses to become a teacher. I knew that science teaching was a good alternative to being drafted. I had the requirements for a Bachelor of Science degree in biology but needed another teaching major and education courses. I chose English as my second major never thinking I would use it.

In my junior year I thought I would stay in Nacogdoches and open a pizza restaurant after graduation. At the time in Nacogdoches there were no pizzas to be found. I located a big old house on a big lot on North Street for sale that had a patio that would be suited for outside dining. A living-quarters could be set up upstairs and the restaurant would be downstairs. I even set up an apprentice program for the summer at a pizza restaurant in Houston. My dad tried to get me a loan, but it didn’t work out. Good thing, because I would have been drafted after graduation to go to Vietnam like everyone else!

Linda and I decided to get married at the end of the summer of 1965. I still had another year to complete my coursework to get a teacher’s certificate in English and biology. That summer I went to summer school to catch up on a couple of classes. I roomed with Charles McIntyre in Unit 2. It was hot in the summer in Nacogdoches, so we would go to class, come back to the air-conditioned dorm and drink Metracal for lunch (we were both trying to lose weight), take a nap, study awhile, go get supper at the diner across from the campus, then would play a couple games of tennis at the court just out our door. One time I was reaching for a ball and I slipped and fell on my ankle. Went to the clinic and found that I had fractured it. They put a plaster cast on my leg up to my knee and I used crutches to get to class for the rest of the semester.

I was to get married at the end of the summer and I decided not to wear my cast to the wedding, so I sat in the kitchen floor of my parent’s house and cut it off with wire cutters. I was glad that I did it since it didn’t hurt at all to walk on it. That also stopped the itching!

We were married in Houston at Epworth Methodist Church and immediately went to Nacogdoches to live after spending a three-night honeymoon in the Hotel America in downtown Houston. We lived in three places in Nacogdoches that year- an apartment on upper North Street, (where the landlord put a third mattress on our bed one day when we were not there making it so tall you could barely get into it!); the “Penman Penthouse” apartments across the street from the high school; and in the SFA married student’s apartments on Starr Street. Linda quit school after her second year and got a job as a telephone operator in town. The telephone office was a block from our apartment, so I would meet her and walk her home when she worked late night shifts.

I finished my course work to become a biology teacher. While doing my internship teaching biology at Lufkin High School, I was given the opportunity to apply in Metairie, Louisiana (outside of New Orleans, LA) as a biology teacher by one of the supervising teachers. He knew the new superintendent in Jefferson Parish Schools in Louisiana. I got the job and an occupational deferment from the army since I was a science teacher at East Jefferson High School. The school district claimed that they could not fill my position with someone else. Math and science teachers were in high demand!

Chapter 15 - Living in Metairie, Louisiana

Linda and I moved to Metairie at the end of the summer and I began teaching. Linda got a job in downtown New Orleans with Enco Oil Company (later to become ExxonMobil) as a clerk in the accounts payable department with the help of Gordon Rees, my mother’s boss in Houston.

Biology teacher

We lived in two places in Metairie- the Lakeside Apartments close to the bridge over Lake Pontchartrain and an apartment on Yale Street closer to East Jefferson High School. We had one car, so I would drive her to work in downtown New Orleans then drive back to Metairie to go to work. The second year that I taught at East Jefferson the school became extremely over-crowded.

We moved there in 1966. A year earlier Jefferson Parish had integrated their schools. All of the Black schools (schools were segregated by race) were permanently closed and the students and faculties were apportioned to the “White” schools. Since Jefferson Parish is on both sides of the Mississippi River, all of the girls living on the east side were bussed to Riverdale High School leaving only boys attending East Jefferson High. There was also a boy’s school on the West bank, West Jefferson High School. Beginning that year East Jefferson had about 4,500 boys in attendance. We began a new schedule, the Platoon System. The first group began at 7:00a.m. until 12:00 noon. The second one began at 1:00p.m. until 6:00p.m. The existing faculty got to choose in which platoon they wanted to teach. I chose to teach during the morning session. I had to sign in at 6:30 in the morning. This meant that I had to take Linda to work early enough to drive to town and back to school. During the winter it was in the dark. She had a long wait in the Enco Building before going to work. I would get home about 12:45 and would have until around 4:30 until I had to go pick her up downtown. Fortunately, there were others who worked with her who lived in Metairie and had a carpool in the evenings, so I didn’t always have to drive back to town.

We lived in Metairie for four years between 1966 and 1970 when we moved back to our hometown, Houston. While we were there, we enjoyed everything New Orleans had to offer. We ate at the many gourmet restaurants in the city, took trips out of town to Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Grand Isle and Grand Terre Island. We went to the Mardi Gras parades every year and enjoyed going to the French Quarter. We had friends who lived in the French Quarter, so we would visit them during Mardi Gras day and have a nice place to stay all day when we got tired of the parades.

I enrolled in Loyola University for a two-year program and received a master’s degree in Guidance and Counseling. I joined the Elks Club and went to monthly meeting with two friends, E.J. Reinhart a teaching colleague and Max Ifland an older guy from Leipzig, East Germany. The Elks building was downtown then and was a great place to be Mardi Gras day as well. I even played Santa one year for the Elks at an orphanage across the river. The brothers did give me a couple of drinks before we left so that I would be jolly. Needless to say, I ate very well while living there and gained about 20 pounds. One night I also quit smoking after six years of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day (three on weekends) after coughing all evening. It was tough, but I did it!

One year when we were going to Houston for the Christmas holidays our car burned up late at night on the interstate highway. I had just had the brakes fixed and somehow a brake line had burst, and the fire started in one of the back wheels. The car was a 1957 Ford Skyliner. A real gem! The fire completely engulfed the car, but we were able to stop by the side of the road, retrieve all of our Christmas presents and luggage. Lee came to get us after we were taken to a service station in Baytown (the closest one to where we were). We spent Christmas visiting our parents and borrowed enough money from them to purchase a green 1967 Chevrolet. We drove back to Metairie without incident.

A 1957 Ford Skyliner was a great car! It was a convertible that had a hard top. The top would fold down into the trunk with the help of several small motors each having a definite function. As an aside, my friend in college Randy Dawson and I took a trip in it to Colorado one summer. We had a great time and saw a lot of beautiful mountainous scenery!

Chapter 16 - Working in the Alief Schools outside of Houston, Texas

In the spring of 1970 on a trip to Houston, I went to see Carl Smith’s dad (Carl lived two houses from me in Mason Park where I grew up). He was an administrator in the Houston Independent School District. Linda and I wanted to return to Houston, and I asked him about job opportunities in the Houston ISD. He told me that I really didn’t want to work there since they were having so many problems after the integration of the schools. He told me of a small school district on the Southwest side of Houston that was growing, and he could get me an interview there with Fred Nicum. Mr. Nicum was a friend of his who was going to go to Alief the next year to work in their administration. I called Mr. Nicum and got an interview with the Assistant Superintendent, Don Killough. I went to see Mr. Killough in an interview. From his body language I didn’t know if he was interested in me as a biology teacher or not. A couple of weeks after I returned to Metairie. I called him to see about the job. He told me that the board had just met and I had been hired to teach in the open biology position at Alief Junior-Senior High School. (At the time the District Administration was also housed there.)

In the summer of 1970, Linda and I moved back to Houston and rented an apartment in Sharpstown (Ruse de Ville) across the street from the Sharpstown Mall. It was a great location and was not far from the little community of Alief. At that time Alief had one junior/senior high school/administration building, two elementary schools- old Alief Elementary School and newly opened Martin Elementary. I went to see Assistant Superintendent, Don Killough to get my teaching materials for my biology class and he told me that the lady teacher who I was replacing had had her baby and decided to come back to work after all. He said that he noticed that I also had a major in English and there was an 8^th grade English position available if I wanted it. I said that I would take it even though I had no idea how to teach 8^th grade English. It was a good experience that year since the other English teachers were very helpful. By then the war in Vietnam was winding down and I didn’t need a deferment anymore.

I worked in the Alief ISD for the next twenty-three years. In 1972 Linda and I had a son, Todd Allen. We lived in the Sharpstown apartment for another year and moved to a house on Montverde Street in Alief school district where we lived until 1983. She worked as a P.E Aide at A.J. Martin Elementary School for a couple of years until Todd was born. She didn’t work again until Todd started school at Smith Elementary School. She became a Teacher’s Aide at that school until 1983. I began working on a doctorate in education in 1970 and graduated with an Ed.D. degree in Educational Administration and Supervision in 1977.

During my years in the Alief ISD I held several positions. I began as an 8th grade English teacher, then as guidance counselor, District Computer Coordinator for Pupil Services, Coordinator of Special Projects, Director of Curriculum and Research, Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum, and Director of Human Resources. Alief I.S.D. was a suburban school district that went from about 3,200 students in 1970 when I began to around 40,000 students when I left in 1993. I had the credentials and happened to be at the right place at the right time to progress in my professional career.

We lived on Montverde St. until Linda and I separated. The neighbor who lived on the right side of us were from Latvia. His name was Juris Ercams and he lived with his wife and mother-in-law. He was the only one in his family that spoke English. His wife and mother-in-law were from Switzerland and spoke German. I guess he was trilingual. They had a dog named Janchick and a cat named Mishuk. His brother would come to visit them sometimes and I found out that he had been in a Russian concentration camp.

The neighbor on the left was named John. He was a trumpet player and an alcoholic. Sometimes he would have a jam session with some of his other buddy musicians after a gig on Saturday night and would still be at it on Sunday morning. One Sunday morning I went out to get my newspaper and found him lying on the sidewalk in front of our house in a drunken stupor. I helped him home and I don’t think he ever remembered me helping him. He never mentioned it! His favorite saying when he was surprised was “Thunder and lightning!”

I made a vegetable garden in the backyard and grew orchids and African violets in the house under Growlux lights on a four-tiered bread stand. My dad and I even made a portable greenhouse that went under the portal in the back porch to use in the winter. The sides were made of plastic, and there was a little heater to keep it warm.

While I was working in the central office in Alief I became acquainted with another teacher, Mike Turnage. I knew him because he was a biology teacher at Alief High and he knew that I used to teach biology. For several years he would have me to come over to the high school and teach the unit on evolution since he was a fundamentalist Christian and felt uncomfortable teaching something that he didn’t believe in.

Mike passed out one day while playing basketball in the “old gym” in Alief. He was later found to have an inoperable brain tumor. One beautiful spring day right before he died, I visited him in his back yard. He had bought a house that had been condemned on the right of way for the new I-45 freeway that was to be built close to downtown Houston through a “Black” neighborhood. He had it cut in half, moved it to Alief and put back together. We sat there on his back porch looking at the blooming spring flowers. I remember how much he loved to admire the flowers in his garden especially knowing that he was dying!

After my first year as an 8^th grade English teacher, I was asked by the principal, Bob Burch if I wanted a new position. The school district was going to begin using the Region IV Education Service Center computer services the next year for pupil scheduling, grade reporting and attendance accounting. The school also wanted to expand their counseling program from one high school counselor, Barbara Wittneben and the junior high counselor, Rosemary Mudd. If I wanted the job a new plyboard office would be built at one of the entrances in the school and the new counselor/computer coordinator and the assistant principal, Gene LaForge would be housed there. The new job for me would be 9^th Grade/Special Education Counselor/District Computer Coordinator for Pupil Services. I took the job.

The next year I worked in Alief Junior-Senior High School in that position. The following year I moved into the newly built Alief Hastings High School. The counseling office was attached to the cafeteria. There was another counselor hired, Lavelle Shelton. There were three of us with a secretary. I was no longer a special education counselor. Now only tenth grade, but still working ½ time as district computer coordinator.

After that year I went to the Assistant Superintendent, Don Killough and told him that the job was becoming too much for my ½ time position. I stressed that I needed to either be a counselor or the district computer coordinator. After a few weeks, I was told that my counseling duties would be discontinued and another counselor, Mr. Weekly was hired in my place. Eventually a new wing was added to Alief Hasting HS which connected the newly built Alief Elsik High School to it. In the new wing was the district computer facility. I was authorized to hire an assistant/secretary. I hired Nita Kennon who was the secretary at Alief Junior High for that position. In our new office we had a card reader that read both mark-sense and keypunched cards, a printer, and a modem which connected us to the Region IV Service Center. Before the opening of our office, I had to drive back and forth between the Service Center to pick up and deliver input cards and output materials. Nita was in charge of pupil attendance accounting and worked directly with all of the attendance accounting clerks in the district. This was quite a chore since we opened an elementary school each year, a middle school every three years and a new high school every five years.

In the length of time that I worked in Alief between 1970 and 1993 I had many different jobs. When I had to spend a year of residency at the University of Houston during the last year of my doctorate, I could no longer retain the job of District Computer Coordinator for Pupil Services. I received my Doctor of Education in Administration and Supervision in the Summer of 1977. My dissertation was entitled “The Relationships Between the Perceived Competencies of a Pupil Service Data Processing Coordinator and Selected Variables of Texas Public School Districts.” At the time the school districts that used the Regional Service Centers for their data processing needs all had Computer Coordinators who worked with their school district and the Regional Service Centers.

Dr. of Education Degree - U of Houston - 1977

The district superintendent at the time, Dr. John Bowser reassigned me to a new one-year position of Coordinator of Special Projects working under his guidance. In that position I carried on many special research projects dealing with the district’s demographics, etc. Harold Hecht from the Region 4 Educational Service Center was hired to take over my job. He had been my contact there.

After that year I took over the position of Director of Curriculum and Research taking over from Lee Pennington who took the job of Superintendent of another school district in Texas. In that position I oversaw the district’s academics. There were six academic coordinators in our department. They were: Karen Kutiper, Language Arts; Dr. Marsha Lilly, Math; Beth Harris, Foreign Language & ESL; Pat Hopkins, Social Studies; Doug Monaghen, P.E./Health, and Lott Brooks, Industrial Arts. In addition, Dr. Becky Anderson oversaw the Counseling Program. I personally met monthly with the district’s librarians, and I was the district’s Textbook Coordinator and in charge of the overall Standardized testing program. After a year or two I was reassigned as Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and given a school district car to drive.

One year I attended a conference of a national computer users in McAllen. I decided to go across the border into Mexico the evening before the conference began. I left everything in my motel room except some money and my driver’s license. I caught a bus to the border that left in front of my motel. About 20 minutes or so I was at the border and walked across to Reynosa. Once across a cab driver asked me if I wanted to go to a saloon farther into town. I said yes and he took me to a saloon and dropped me off. I went in and had a beer. A couple of prostitutes came up to me and asked me if they could render their services. I told them that I was only there to have a couple of beers.

A little while later a lady who had gotten off a bus in front of the saloon came in and sat down at my table. I told her I wasn’t interested in her, and she said she wasn’t a whore and only wanted to talk. We talked about her family who were in the U.S. then she wanted me to go to the bathroom to see her breasts. I told her that I didn’t want to and I got up from the table and left. As I was leaving, she said she wanted my suede jacket as payment for her companionship. I wasn’t about to give to her. I got about a block down the street and two Mexican cops came up to me and told me I was under arrest for not paying the lady the $20 that she told them she was entitled to for services rendered. I told them what had happened, but they arrested me anyway.

They took me to a little building down the street and put me in a holding cell. I only had a $20 bill, so I put it in my sock. A couple of hours later I was taken out of the little cell in the building and put into a “patty wagon.” We left that part of town and they picked up a couple more people and threw them in the back with me. They were Mexicans who had been picked up for fighting or drunkenness.

We finally went to the police station and were all taken in for booking. There was a cop at a desk that took my driver’s license and wristwatch and put them in an envelope. They took my photograph and put me into a big cell with a bunch of other men who all seemed to be drunk. It was a big room with a concrete toilet trough on one end. I sat down on the concrete floor away from all the others. Sometime during the night, I woke up and a mouse was sniffing around my crouch! I shooed him away. Part of the cell room had a wire mesh screen and a guard with a rifle was asleep in a wooden chair. Also, during the night, I heard someone screaming as they were being beaten by a guard in another room.

Just after dawn several men came in to hose down the concrete floor in the cell that we were in. I told one of the older guards that had just come on duty that I could pay $20 for my release. He left and came back and let me out of the cell. I went to another officer at a little desk, gave him the $20 from my sock and he gave me my belonging back.

I left the building as soon as I could! I asked a guard the direction of the U.S. border and walked as fast as I could in that direction. After a mile or so I got to the border, crossed it and looked around for the bus stop. I had no more money so I asked a guy standing waiting for the bus if he would pay my fare. He took pity on me and said he would. I rode the bus to my motel down the road.

It was getting close to time for the conference to begin so I showered, changed my clothes, and drove to the conference. I sat through several sessions and finally went back to the motel. I went to bed early that night and thought about how lucky everything turned out! Who knows how long I would have been in jail in Mexico with no one knowing where I was? I never told anyone about my ordeal!

After a few years in Alief there was a change in the administration and the school board. I was reassigned to the Department of Human Resources and given the title of Director of Human Resources. I kept my pay grade, although I was no longer an assistant superintendent. Michele Wilhelm, my supervisor, was brought in from Hobbs, New Mexico (her husband was the new superintendent of the neighboring Ft. Bend ISD) and she became the new assistant superintendent of our department. My responsibilities included creating and administering the Alief Career Ladder, the district’s insurance program, new staff orientation and keeping up the official administrative team manual. I also attended the state school board meetings every month in Austin, Texas and brought back the new information to the administrative team that met weekly. While we were in Austin Jerry Byrd and I would always go to Donn’s Depot to dance with the other female personnel directors. That is where we met Eddyth Worley and her sister Betty Jo Monk. We all became good friends during that time. Eddyth developed cancer after she and her husband had moved to Washington D.C. He was an officer in the Air Force and would sometime have to stay at the Pentagon if there was a national emergency. He was having a hard time taking care of her after she came home from the hospital, so I went there for a week to help out. Eddyth was pretty weak but insisted on showing me around the city. I drove her car and we went to the old Union Station, the National Cathedral and to Arlington Cemetery. We got to drive around the cemetery since she somehow had a pass to do so. (As an aside, she and her husband moved to San Antonio where she died from her cancer.)

Eddyth Worley, Jerry Byrd, Betty Jo Monk

Denver AASPA Conference - 1990

During that time, I also assisted Jerry Byrd, the Director of Personnel in the staff recruiting process. This entailed annual recruiting trips around the state and attending job fairs throughout Texas and Louisiana as well as the annual job fair in Greeley, Colorado. We got so many good elementary teachers from the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley that our school district made a deal with a local apartment complex to make them feel at home in Alief.

Jerry and I had gone to SFA together in the ‘60s and we enjoyed working together. He was in the Delta Sigma Phi Fraternity at SFA and I was a Pike. We also attended the State and National School Personnel conventions each year in various cities in the United States where we met many other personal administrators from around the US. One year the conference was held in Atlanta, Georgia. One of the Texas administrators filled his truck with several cases of Lone Star beer before driving to Atlanta. At the conference we used one of our rooms as a “Texas Hospitality Room.” We all dressed in our Texas clothes, played C&W music and filled the bathtub full of ice and free Lone Star beers. Needless to say, it was quite a hit! Also at that conference I met a Black personnel administrator from another part of the United States. Several of us had gone to a club to dance and drink beer. While I was dancing with her, she mentioned how different the times were- she was dancing with a White Texan to county western music in Atlanta, Georgia. What were the chances of that in the past! (She later sent me a photo of her dad with President Lyndon Johnson at the signing of the new Civil Rights law in the White House). Times had really changed!

Many years later while I was living in Santa Fe Jerry called me up to tell me he was dying. He had been sick for a long time with leukemia and other illnesses and knew that he didn’t have much time to live. I found out that he died only a few days later. We had a lot of good times together and missed him a lot!

In 1984 I became a Licensed Professional Counselor and gave presentations throughout the state for others who wanted to keep up their state licenses. I used money from my grandmother Anderson’s estate to attend the Christine Valme Institute of Cosmetology and received my Texas Professional Massage Therapist License in 1996. I bought a massage chair and table and used them at several locations in Houston. I even went to people’s homes to give personal massages. I was once a special birthday present for a guy from his wife!

I also gave presentations around the state to other groups of educators. Since there was federal money available to school districts for Multicultural Understanding, I made up a presentation on that topic and provided it to many other school districts other than Alief I.S.D. I even went to Augusta, Georgia once to make a presentation to their faculty. I had an opportunity to play golf at the Master’s Golf Course but turned it down since I was not a golfer.

The idea of using the Internet in education had just been devised so I made up a presentation on how to use it in the classroom. I addressed this issue to many school district faculties using a dial-up connection to the Compass Net computer server that I used. I had to get a very long phone wire to stretch from the school office to a classroom to make the connection. (There were no modem/router connections then!)

My friend Doug Monaghen and I had many adventures during the time I worked in Alief and after. He was the P.E./Health Coordinator in the Curriculum Department. We had many adventures together. We would try to ride our bicycles every month. Many times, I would meet him at the Brookshire Café (he lived in Brookshire for a time) and we would ride 20 or so miles from there to San Felipe, etc We would also ride our bicycles on various trips around the state in the hill county. One year we took a Red Eye flight to Boston, met his brother who had rented bikes for us and rode for three days seeing Lexington, Concord, poets ridge cemetery finally meeting him in Salem before returning to Houston.

Doug had a part-time business doing Physical Ed. Workshops for teachers in various school districts. He would hire me to help him (pay my airfare, car rental, food and lodging). We went to various cities putting on these workshops. When we were finished, we would always take trips around the area and see the sights. (Chicago, Salt Lake City, Jackson Hole, Miami). There were several in Texas as well. Other business-related trips involved Wellness Conferences in Denver, CO and Madison, WI. We also used to run 10-Ks in Houston and even a Team Triathlon with Tom Draper in Beaumont.


Tom Draper, Doug Monaghen & me	Ken running in Bayou City Fun Run (10K)

In January of 1993 I was told that my contract as Director of Human Resources had not been renewed. The department was to be reorganized and I would be reassigned as the Director of the Classified Personnel Department. It would be a total change for me overseeing the district’s bus drivers, cafeteria workers, maintenance workers and custodians. After thinking it over I decided that it was not a job that I wanted, so I wrote a letter to the superintendent, Michelle Wilhelm, resigning at the end of my contract in July. She asked me to come to her office and told me that I would always have a job in Alief ISD as long as I wanted. I told her that I had made up my mind and if she wanted to reorganize now that I would leave immediately and allow her to do that without me being around, just pay me until my contract was up. The next day she had me to come into her office and gave me permission to leave. I boxed up all of my belongings and left the next day. I had no job, but I had a salary and benefits for the next six months!

During the time I worked for the Alief school district I had many personal life changes. Linda had become friends with a fellow co-worker, Sara Haines. We would do things together as families. Sara was married to Jim and had two daughters, Terry and Samantha. One summer they were renting a beach house on Bolivar Peninsula for a week and another time the four of us went on a vacation to New Orleans staying in a little hotel in the French Quarter. All this time unknown to me Linda and Jim were developing more than a friendship.

One other time she and I had arranged to vacation in San Diego to stay at the motel where we had stayed years earlier on a vacation with Todd. Right before the trip I got a really bad cold and couldn’t go. She told me that she still wanted to go and it would be good for her to get away. I agreed and she went by herself. Years later I learned that Jim met her there and took my place on that vacation!

Needless to say, our relationship was not going well. During a hurricane in 1983 Todd was spending the night with a friend. Linda and I talked about our strained relationship and decided to get a divorce. When I told her that I would move out to an apartment and she and Todd could stay in the house until it sold, she told me that she wanted me to take Todd with me. At the time I thought it was peculiar until I learned that Jim’s truck was seen frequently at our house once Todd and I were out of it. Todd and I moved to an apartment on the other side of Alief and Todd changed school from Killough Middle School to Albright Middle School. We both had adjustments to make!

Killough Middle School was named after the same person who originally hired me in 1970. The Alief school district’s policy was to name the new schools after residents present and past who contributed in some way to the growing school district. By the time I left the district I personally knew many of the people who had schools named after them- Elsik High School, the Elsik High School nurse (she didn’t like kids very much); Kennedy Elementary, another school nurse; and many elementary school teachers including: Debbie Alexander, Alexander Elementary School; Vera Chambers, Chambers Elementary; Ms. Chancellor, Chancellor Elementary; Ms. Hearne, Hearne Elementary; Ms. Landis, Landis Elementary; Ruth Sneed, Sneed Elementary- a special education and home bound teacher; Ms. Youens, Youens Elementary; Ms. Horn, Horn Elementary; and Helen Mata, Mata Intermediate School- an elementary school teacher and the first bilingual Spanish program teacher. Others who had schools named for them are: Viola Mahanay, Mahanay Elementary, an elementary school cafeteria worker; Mr. Olle, Olle Middle School, the first district’s mail delivery person; Bob Cummings, Cummings Elementary- a long-time board member; Talmage Heflin, Heflin Elementary- a board member and Texas congressman; Ann O’Donnell, O’Donnell Middle School- a math teacher and Deputy Superintendent of Instruction (my boss in the Curriculum Department); Ed Taylor, Taylor High School- a high school teacher; and the Leroy Crump, Crump Stadium and Athletic Facilities- the first district athletic director. I think back to how the Alief ISD was so small and how well we all knew each other. For a couple of years the entire administrative team would get together for a weekend Administrative Team Retreat before the school year would begin at various out of town locations.

Chapter 17 - Linda 2

Another life-change for me occurred in 1984. I had been teaching English for Chinese Speakers in the Alief Community Evening School when my life was changing. I had begun to learn Mandarin at Saturday classes held at the Institute of Chinese Culture at Rice University. I tried to find someone to teach the course for me. I knew about this cute, blond English-as-a Second Language teacher at Hastings High School, Linda Ashman. I asked her if she would teach the class for me, but she said that she could not. I was so taken with her that I was determined that she would be the first person that I would date since my divorce. I asked her if she were married and found out that she had just been divorced from her second husband John Ashman. She had two girls, Suzie nine years old and Amy eleven. Since it was October, I decided to ask her on a date with the whole family to the Texas Renaissance Festival outside of Magnolia, Texas. She accepted and she and the girls, Todd and a friend of his and I went to the festival. We had a great time together, but Linda later told me later that she thought I was strange, since I didn't hold her hand at any time during the day. It was my first date in nineteen years, and I was a little uncomfortable.

Our second date was to the Wounded Armadillo country/western dance hall outside Richmond, Texas on Highway 90. We had a great time and I fell in love with her that evening. (Years later she told me that she didn’t think she really ever loved me, so I guess I was the only one in love!) There was no turning back for me. I pursued her relentlessly until I convinced her to get married. We even moved the date up to February because Todd was tired of going back and forth between her house and our apartment.

That Christmas before we were married was a big one for both of us. She planned to spend a few days with her parents in Chicago. She and the girls went there on one of the coldest holiday seasons in recorded history. They all had to buy some more warm clothes to make it through the freezing cold. While she was there the man that she had been dating before we met, Jim Rectner, came by to see her at her parent's house on his way to New York to visit his family. He knew that she was serious about me, and he had come to ask her to marry him. She refused! During her visit she got fed up with her father's attitude toward her, told him off, and left their house with the girls, Jim and her ex-husband, John Ashman who was also there. They went to a hotel where she called me to tell me what had happened. Since it was Christmas eve, she could not get a ticket for a flight out of there. I immediately called my cousin, Gary Madden who worked for Continental Airlines at the time and made arrangements for her to get a seat on a plane back to Houston. She put to girls on a bus to Moline, Ill. to go to their other grandparent's house.

I met her when she arrived at Intercontinental Airport in the afternoon of Christmas eve. She was really in bad condition both physically and psychologically. We went to get a steak at Anderson's Steak House on Hwy. 6 and then went to her house. I had bought her a bicycle (which she never rode) and had some cheese, wine and grapes awaiting her return. After spending Christmas day at my parent’s house, we spent the rest of the week at her house disconnecting the phone and getting away from the world. I got a telegram from Linda1, Todd's mom, that she couldn't get in touch with us and didn't appreciate it. Todd was spending time with friends at the time. I later took him to his mother’s apartment.

The holidays were really cold that winter. The water pipes broke in her garage and we had to go to my apartment to shower. At her house we had to borrow water from the neighbors for about three days. She always reminded me that the shower in my apartment was dirty and the toilet had pink slime in it. I guess I didn’t notice those things very closely.

After the Christmas holidays the kids all came back from their respective other parent's homes and our relationship continued with them as well. Todd and I spent a lot of time over at their house and one day he began to cry, since he was so tired of going back and forth. We had planned to get married during spring break in April, but decided to marry on Sunday, February 19, 1984.

We got our marriage license at the Fort Bend Court House in Richmond, Texas and went to a little cafe in a house across the street to celebrate. We were married in the Ashford Park Methodist Church during part of the regular Sunday service. It is permitted in the service, but most people don't know that. The preacher wore his white vestments and gave a sermon about being good to one another and what the wedding vows mean. We all, Linda, me, and the kids stood up at the altar and were married. That afternoon and evening we had the reception at the yellow house where Todd and I moved in with Linda and the girls.

We had to make some room arrangement changes when we got there. When we were moving in, Todd’s parakeet cage door came open and Linda’s cat, Jose carried the parakeet in his mouth down the hall. We took the parakeet wrapped in a towel to Linda’s friend, Richard the vet (I later found out that they had dated in the past so she never had to pay vet bills. She also never paid bills to her electrician as well!), but there was nothing that could be done. Needless to say, it was a sad beginning.

I also learned about my new family during the first month that we were married. Suzie was out in the back yard dancing to a song on the radio and I asked her to turn it down. Her response was unbelievable to me. The smile on her face turned to rage. She began ranting and raving about how I couldn't tell her what to do and that she would call her dad in Arkansas which she did that time and many, many times after that. That was the way she reacted to criticism or an attempt at correction. This other personality would come out from time to time without prediction. The most unusual thing is that after a while she would forget about it and even deny that she acted that way.

Finally, one day in the eighth grade we were called by her school counselor, Mrs. Erickson because she believed that Suzie was suicidal. I called around and found a clinic that dealt with kids with problems and we picked her up from school and took her directly there. From there she was hospitalized in Pasadena. After a few days we found out that that hospital was not sensitive to kids with her problems and so we transferred her to another hospital in Houston. She responded well and after a few weeks we brought her home. We entered her into the Individualized Study Center (ISC) in Alief ISD where she did very well. She progressed to one-half day back at Killough Middle School then full days. For the ninth grade Linda entered her in Second Baptist High School where she completed her ninth-grade year. Linda then enrolled her in Stratford HS in the Spring Branch ISD where she also did very well. After graduation she entered St. Edwards University in Austin. She really needed that small, protected environment to succeed. She had an extremely successful freshman year in Austin and worked as a lifeguard and water aerobics instructor in Austin all summer.

Amy was eleven when we married. She was very prim, proper, and responsible. She had taken care of Suzie for many years in the evenings and after school while Linda attended St. Thomas University working on a master’s degree in Education in English as a Second Language (ESL). She was always fixed up perfectly, hair in place clothes in perfect order and very clean. I think that she was on one hand relieved that I was there to take care of them, but on the other hand became resentful that I was there to take her place as caretaker to both her mother and sister. She always treated me at arms distance, unlike Susie who really needed a daddy at that point in time.

Nine years later at 21 yrs. old she just began giving me big hugs that she really meant. All of the years before her affection was very cursory. Entering her senior year at Southwest Texas University in San Marcos she was quite a success story. She became a member of Delta Zeta Sorority; she was on the student congress and during the summer between her junior and in her senior year she went on a Mayan dig to Belize with her anthropology class. She also went to Sweden for a week to represent the Houston Swedish Club as the 1993 Santa Lucia. Linda went as well thanks to Uncle Knut. They met with many cousins while they were there.

Amy's claim to fame was her attitude during her ninth and tenth grade years in high school. She joined the New Wave group. They all wore black and white clothes, painted their fingernails black, used white power on their faces with either black or bright red lipstick, and “moosed” their hair (hers was dyed bright red) up in spikes. What a sight! She would join a group every weekend in the Montrose area and at dance clubs. I would take her and pick her up after the dance, but I would have to park down the street where her friends wouldn't see our Aerostar van. She also began smoking at that time. However, she wouldn’t smoke in front of either Linda or me.

One year on Mother’s Day she took a bus downtown with her girl friend from down the street and didn’t return home. Later that evening Linda called the police to see if anything had been turned in regarding her. She had just disappeared! A couple of days later the Chief of the Alief ISD police department called me at work and told me that Amy and three friends had been located at a boy’s house. They had apprehended them and were going to take them to the Juvenile Detention Center and if I wanted them to bring Amy home. I told him to take her too and we would go get her there. Linda called Woody Acord, her father who lived in Eureka Springs, Arkansas and asked him if he would take her for the rest of the school year. He said he would, and he flew to Houston. He stayed with us one night then took Amy back to Arkansas with him where she completed the 9^th grade. After the summer that year she returned to us as a changed girl! She enrolled in Alief Elsik High School for the next year and all went well.

Todd had a much more interesting life because of our new association with Linda2 and the girls. When Todd's mother, Linda1 and I decided to get a divorce, she surprised me when she told me that she was going to stay in the house until it sold, and that Todd and I were going to move out. I was pretty shocked at first that she would give him up like that, but I was happy because I knew that I would be able to be with him and see him grow and develop until he left for college. She was really concerned about him at first, but after a while when she and Jim were spending more time together, she was not that concerned. She and Jim finally moved to Garland, Texas (outside of Dallas) with Jim's work for Texas Instruments and Todd only went to visit them during the summers.

When Todd was in the eleventh grade, I asked him if he wanted to take the GED and go to Junior College instead of finishing high school the next year. He could do this since he was a year behind since he had failed the eighth grade at Killough Middle School. He decided to take the test and passed it with flying colors. In the fall he moved in with his mother and Jim in Garland and enrolled in Richland Community College where he attended for his freshman year. The next year he moved to Denton to attend North Texas University so that he could be close to his girlfriend, Jill Ridling. Jill was his high school sweetheart who attended Texas Women's University (TWU). The next year they moved in together into an apartment where they lived until the Christmas holidays,1994 when they decided to split up. Todd became interested in the major of International Studies and enrolled in St. Edward's University in Austin. He put his financial package together by himself, transferred his job with the Bombay Company and moved into the dorm to begin his new life for himself.

It wasn't long after Linda2 and I were married that we purchased a house at 3126 Meadway, our second home after we moved from the yellow house on Westwick. Todd, Amy and Suzie shared the upstairs and Linda and I downstairs. We spent a lot of time together as a family. Eating supper together every day at 6:30 pm, leaving the newspaper out for all to read, going on outings together, etc. As trying as it was to raise three kids who were all teenagers at the same time, it wasn't so bad. We were a very close family. In fact, a lot was learned about human nature from the experience by all of us.

Our house was broken into one year and we had to by a dog. We bought a Great Dane and named her “Gabby”. Suzie wouldn’t go into the house alone after school until we had the dog. She would sit on a bench on the front porch and wait for someone to come home. We kept Gabby until we left the house and moved into an apartment later on. We advertised for someone to take her and were pleased when a lady called and told us her dad just lost his dog and needed one to take his place. He had a big lot for the dog to run and we were all happy! We even gave him her big dog house.

During that time, I trained as a massage therapist with Cristine Valme Institute of Cosmetology. I got my license and bought a massage table and chair. I did some chair massages at the Whole Earth Food Store and took my table to several homes. Among many others I was the birthday gift for one guy from his wife and massaged a big football player whenever he was in town.

My dad, Lee died on April 20, 1991. He was 73 years old. He had been ill for several years with various cancers and arthritis. He died in my mom and dad’s apartment. I had just returned from a presentation that I made in Austin. He had waited until I returned before giving it up. When I got there my mom, Linda2 and Gordon Rees (my mom’s ex-boss at Exxon) were there. My mom and I were sitting beside him on the bed when he breathed his last breath. Each of us rubbing one of his arms.

After he had died we went into the living room where the other two were sitting on the couch. They both had surprised looks on their faces. I learned from them at the moment of my dad’s death the florescent light in the kitchen had begun to blink (the valence had to be replaced) and the top shelf of the bookcase had broken spilling all the books on it.

Guess Lee was leaving with a bang! We will never know!

Linda2 and I were married for ten years. In 1984 we put the house on the market. The market value at that time was less than the remainder of the mortgage. We tried to work a deal with the bank, but they were going to foreclose. We moved from the house to the Yorktown apartments in the Galleria area of Houston. We were living there one summer with Amy who was home from college. Suzie and Todd were not there that summer.

One night I was returning from presenting a Multicultural Education program for the Regional Education Service Center in San Angelo, Texas. About ten o’clock or so at night I had just come in the apartment after flying home. Linda met me at the door and told me she wanted me to hear something. She had a recording on the telephone answering machine of a woman saying “Ken Bower, I left my wallet in your bathroom again, oh no.” The towels also had a perfume smell that Linda didn’t recognize. Then she brought out a box with a pink bra in it. She said that she had found in our bedroom under the bed. It wasn't her's or Amy's and she had taken it to Austin to see if it was Suzie's the week before when she was at a Law Conference with her fellow administrators. So, who had I been entertaining in our apartment when she was not at home? I was surprised! I had not had anyone over and was not having an affair. I think it was an inside set- up job! Thinking about the facts: The recording of the woman’s voice said “Ken Bower, ------. A lover certainly wouldn’t have said my whole name. She said “again” meaning that it was at least the second time she had left her wallet in my bathroom. What are the chances of that? The perfume was one that Linda didn’t recognize, so someone had to put it on the towel when she or I were not home. The pink bra under the bed was another item that had to have been placed there by someone when we were not home. The fact that Linda took it to Austin with her to see if it was Suzie’s is an indication that she really didn’t know whose it was. So, Linda probably didn’t set it up. Amy was the only other one home with us. Why it was done to me I will probably never know!

After all was said Linda told me that I shouldn’t plan on sleeping there that night. I didn’t know what to say or do. I just denied that anyone was ever there with me. I was told that it would be best if I found somewhere else to spend the night, because I was not welcome there anymore. I asked where I would go and Linda said that was my problem! So I left, in a daze! I drove down Westheimer Blvd. wondering what to do and thinking about how bizarre the current situation was. I stopped at the Miami Subs restaurant in the Target parking lot and got a cup of coffee, sat, and tried to decide what to do. I was tired and decided to sleep in my VW van in the driveway at our house where I felt that I would be safe.

The next day I got in touch with her, and she said she was going to work and she had piled all my things in the middle of the floor in the apartment for me to pick up. I went over to pick them up. Nobody was home.

The next day I went to the Apartment Connections on Westheimer Ave. and told them I needed a small apartment. I was referred to the Courtside at Olympia Apartments. That evening I had supper with Mimi and went back to her apartment with her where I slept on her couch. The following day after signing the lease I drove over to the apartment off Wilcrest Ave. and moved in with what I had. It was a small, upstairs, one room apartment with a kitchen. I later filed for a divorce with my lawyer and high school friend, Dennis Medley. He had been working as a Public Defender in Houston. Before that we filed for bankruptcy. Linda got another lawyer and tried to get ½ of my mother’s money that I had cosigned with her. I immediately took my name off all my mother’s accounts. Finally, that part of my life was over!

Chapter 18 - Single Again

As I stated before I liked to dance. There were many Country Western dance places around Houston at the time- Tin Hall in Tomball, Way Out West on Gessner, the Post Oak Ranch, the Longhorn Saloon, Classics, and several others. I spent every weekend and some weeknights out dancing C&W. One night at Tin Hall I danced with a group of ladies who were from the SSQQ dance studio. That is where I met Brenda Anderson. She was a great dancer and she and I got along very well. After a while I would meet her at the Longhorn Saloon to dance. Before long she came over to my apartment to spend the night. After that we would meet to dance, and she would come over to spend the night. She lived in the Champions area of Houston. She would never let me in her house but would meet me in the driveway when I went to pick her up. I found out she had three girls. Keppi, the oldest, who was an elementary school teacher in Spurger, Texas and lived in Fred, Texas; Courtney who was attending Sam Houston University in Huntsville, Texas; and Cassie who was married to Tyson and lived in an apartment in Houston. Brenda’s mom also lived by herself in a Houston condo and her dad with his wife lived in the Westbury section of town where Brenda grew up.

Later I moved to a bigger apartment in the same complex and Brenda moved more of her things in little by little. I found out the reason that she had not let me into her house was that she was a hoarder. When her third husband Rex left her she began to hoard. Her house was a mess! It had not been cleaned for years and her daughter, Cassie and her husband Tyson had moved in upstairs. I offered to help her clean it up to sell and she let me do it. It took a lot of work, but we finally got it clean enough to put on the market. She sold it and moved into an apartment while I was on my RV trip in 1999.

In 1994 I became a minister with the Universal Life Church in Modesto, CA.

Being a minister I could perform marriages. That was really the reason that I joined the church. The first wedding I performed was in 1996 when I married Eric and Victoria, Todd’s Austin friends. The service was performed in the backyard of one of their friend’s house. Over the years I performed nine more including George and Michele (Lis) Lawrence in 2001 at the Hotel Loretto in Santa Fe; Todd and Rachel in 2014; Robert and Anne (Blomquist) Martin (Anne was a school friend of mine) in 2006 in the chapel at Bishop’s Lodge in Santa Fe; Chip and Karen (Anderson) Leyba in 2008 (really two services in the Pecos wilderness; one private and another public); and our across-the-street neighbors in Eldorado, Dan Goffredo and Mike Jackson (a gentlemen couple) in 2013.

Getting back to the time after I left Alief schools I didn’t know what to do. I had been working with St. Thomas University teaching three ESL (English-as-a-Second Language) endorsement courses and a Macintosh computer lab for teachers as an adjunct professor, but I needed a job in a public school to complete three more years in the Teacher Retirement System of Texas to receive full retirement benefits.

During our relationship we took several trips around Texas. One of the trips involved Chudje's Saloon in Engle. Engle is on the highway midway between Schulenberg and Flatonia. It is an old Czech community. The saloon served the farmer’s beer needs in the area. We got to know Mr. and Mrs. Chudje very well after many trips to the old saloon. We even had a 100yr. anniversary of the old saloon party there!

Chapter 19 - Christa McAuliffe Middle School

After following a few leads interviewing for jobs in different school districts I went to a Fort Bend ISD job fair. I interviewed to be an ESL teacher, but that didn’t work out. I saw that a counselor position was available at Christa McAuliffe Middle School. I was interviewed for that position by the principal, Mr. Ross Cahe, and was offered the position on the spot. It was an all-Black middle school which fed to Willowridge High School, also with an all-Black population. I stayed at Christa McAuliffe Middle School for two and one-half years until I could retire from TRS with full benefits at age 52. It was great working with students who really needed someone from a different background than themselves! It was the most rewarding job in education that I had ever had! These were students who needed a male role model in their lives and a White person. Most of the students were afraid of white people because of living in an all-Black community.

Mrs. Magnolia Lacy - fellow counselor

Mrs. Lacy helped me to become acquainted with students in the school population We started a peer counseling group for the students to help them deal with some of their problems.

“Observations at Christa McAuliffe Middle School 1993-94:

Christa McAuliffe Middle School (CMMS) is part of the Fort Bend Independent School District, located southwest of Houston, Texas. It is not typical of the other middle schools in the district, since the district is primarily a White, middle to upper middle class suburban school district. Grades six, seven, and eight are taught at CMMS with an enrollment of 1,169 students. The ethnic breakdown of the student population is 78% African American, 20% Hispanic, and 2% White or other. Students on free lunch comprise 56% of the school’s population. The community population is primarily composed of small businesses and single-family dwellings. The school population is reflective of the demographics of the community.

The academic status of many of the students who attend CMMS is demonstrated by the following statistics on academic achievement. Based upon the spring 1994 results of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), 47% of students in all grades did not meet minimum expectations in the area of reading. Sixty-six percent of the eighth-grade students did not meet minimum expectations in the area of writing.

Many of the students live with either a single parent or in a family situation different from the nuclear family. Many of the students attend school on either a "Power of Attorney", indicating that they are living with someone other than their parent or a "Dual Residency", indicating that they are living in a multiple family situation. Every so often the school security officers wait at the Metro bus stop close to the school and pick up the students who are living outside of the district in the Houston I.S.D. and whose parents have given false residential information so that their children could attend CMMS.

In 1994 the school had a turnover rate of 35% of the instructional staff. All of the administrative staff are new at the school. The principal and two of the assistant principals have been there less than two years and one assistant principal is in his first year.

Academically in the 1993-94 school year, only 12% of the eighth-grade students had passed all sections (reading, writing and math) on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS). For this reason the Fort Bend I.S.D. central office staff spent a considerable part of the first six weeks in 1994 disaggregating the data and talking to the different grade level teams about how to teach the skills the students needed to make at least the 20% passage rate mandated by the state department of education (TEA).

Some observations about the students:

• on some days they seem to be in control in the halls, cafeteria, and classrooms and some days the staff is in control

• many of the teachers would rather the students be out of their classrooms and anywhere in the building so that they could teach the others

• many teachers’ personality changed from the beginning of school to the end of school-many began as caring individuals enthusiastic about using teaching methods that worked and by the end of the year were continually angry and upset and screamed at the students

• some teachers carried long rods and meter sticks in the halls at the beginning of the school year, but were told later that it was inappropriate

• others used whistles in the halls in the beginning, but their use decreased during the year

• the assistant principal continuously used a public address system in the cafeteria, but was ignored by the students until threats of "structured lunch" were used

• the lunch lines had to be continuously monitored each day to keep the students from pushing each other, arguing, and fighting

• students would leave their lunch trays and lunch debris on the tables, on the floors and under the tables if not reprimanded by adult lunch monitors at all times during the lunch period

• in many classrooms there was continuous chaos for the entire class period; students talking, yelling, getting out of their seats, picking on other students in the room, leaving the classroom during the lesson, and occasionally pushing and fighting with each other

Many times the student closest to the teacher’s overhead projector would spit on the overhead slide when the teacher was not looking. This would make little spots all over the overhead slide that the students called “flecking.”

• the teachers that I observed that could maintain order were those who were firm, the students respected and who varied their instruction several times during the class period. The race of the teacher did not seem to matter, it was the respect that the students had for the individual teacher that seemed to make the difference

• in one-to-one conferences with many of the students I learned that:

-they are concerned about going to college

-they have no idea that what they are doing now has any connection to what they will do in the future

-many of them live in very chaotic home environments with little or no stability

-most of the boys want to be world class athletes, but are unaware that you have to also be good academically

-some of the girls shared that if you have several babies (5) the government will send you enough money to get by

-it is not a stigma to receive a free or reduced-price lunch

-a major part of the day is spent in trying to impress their peers

-most of their self-identity comes from how they are perceived by heir peers: they are unafraid of others including adults is very important to their self- esteem

-their "public appearance" and their identity is the most important thing to them

It became obvious that the way that we try to educate these students does not work for most of them. Alternate methods of educating them must be found or the school will continue to be a ‘holding tank’ protecting the community that we are at the present time.

Chapter 20 - My Trip to Yap as detailed from my daily log

In 1999, I decided to visit Suzie who was working with the Peace Corp in Yap, Micronesia. On Sunday, January 3, I left Houston IAH at 9:40a.m. for a 6.5 hr. flight to Honolulu. Changed planes in Honolulu for a 7.5 hr. flight to Guam with a one-hour layover at the airport. Arrived in Guam on Monday, January 4 at 6:50p.m. (the next day) since we crossed the International Dateline. A driver from the Hotel Mai Ana (.5 mi from the airport) picked me up and took me to the hotel. I unpacked and went to bed.

Tuesday, January 5

Took the hotel shuttle to Denny’s for breakfast. Ordered a Guam Slam breakfast. Scrambled eggs on a mound of fried rice and slices of spam around it. Pretty good! Back to the hotel to go on a tour of Guam. Paid $60 for a private tour of the central and south part of the island. The guide, Fred Cruz, was a Chamorro (native of Guam). We drove around the island from 8:30 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. He showed me the historic sites around the island and explained the island’s history to me. Excellent tour!

In the afternoon I went to the Micronesia Mall. Had to take a taxi back to the hotel for $12 but went to the airport first to check in for the 5:00 a.m. flight to Yap in the morning. I would have to wake up at 3:00 am and get to the airport by 4:00 a.m. Wednesday, January 6.

Woke up at 2:30 am. Couldn’t sleep any longer. Wake-up call at 3:00 am. Took a shower and was in the hotel office by 3:20 a.m. for the short ride to the airport. Looked for breakfast at the airport, but all that was available was a turkey and cheese sandwich on a bun. Caught the plane and by 5:00 a.m. was off for Yap.

I landed in Yap at 6:20 a.m. It was still dark but beginning to get a little light. Coming into Yap I noticed that there were very few lights on the island. Not at all like Guam. After a quick walk-through customs, Suzie and her island mom, Clara, were waiting for me. Clara had made me a lei of flowers woven with palm leaves, called a neuneu in Yapese. Suzie had woven red flowers together in a headband for me as well. There were a couple of island girls there to meet tourists with other woven necklaces. An interesting fact was that they were not wearing tops, just lava-lava dresses and neuneus. It certainly was not just any airport in the world! We got into a pickup truck and drove to Suzie’s hut on the beach. The road wound through tropical jungle-like terrain for the 30-minute trip from the airport. Quite a culture shock for me!

When we got to the beach, Suzie showed me the way to her hut from the road, down a path beside a house where a couple of old aunts live. I left my things in her hut and planned to go to her school. We got a ride to her school from her island dad, Martin (pronounced Marteen). After visiting the school, a man had left a rental car for us to drive ($35/day). The car was interesting since it was imported from Australia and had the steering wheel on the right and the speed in km.

In the evening we walked to her “parent’s” house. It was about 1/4 mile or so from Suzie’s beach. We walked down the beach and through the jungle and up a hill to their home. I met Clara’s cousin Victor (9yrs old); sister, Geraldine (16yrs old); and Walter her uncle. Her brother was there this summer but was now away attending a private school on another island. I found Walter quite interesting. He was just visiting for a while, but no one knew for how long. It really didn’t matter however, since family members and friends can come and go as much as they like in Yap and they are welcomed by all. He had the appearance of a pirate; he was very dark complicated with Japanese features and he shaved his head except for a long-braided scalp lock on one side of his head. He also had a mustache. He used two colored plastic balls to hold his hair in braids. He had been to school to learn to be a navigator and was really interesting to talk to. For supper Clara fixed us fried fish, boiled yams, plantains, and tapioca root. It was really good especially if you put soy sauce on it. After sitting around talking for a while (the men stay in a group and the women in another), I gave them the presents that I brought. They all seemed to like everything, tee shirts, flip-flops, a toy truck for Victor, scented soap for the women, a cap for Martin and bandanas for all. (Suzie had told me what to bring.) After that Suzie and I walked down the hill to the road and walked to the huts on the beach. It was very dark so we had to use flashlights. Along the way we had to pass a graveyard where many of the graves are outlined with old Japanese beer bottles. Suzie explained that people like to bury their relatives close to their houses.

Thursday, January 7

I woke up early and took a cold shower (the only kind there was). Got ready and went with Suzie to school after going to her mom’s for breakfast. She had made French toast and left it on the kitchen table for us. At school I met her principal and the agriculture teacher. At lunch we went into Colonia City and ate at a restaurant by the water. I had stir fried veggies with chicken, rice, papaya and an ice-cold coconut to drink. They had put the coconut in the refrigerator and cooled it then put a hole in an eye and put a straw in it. Very refreshing! We were using a little truck that the guy had let us use since the car had died with Suzie the night before while she was out driving it around. The fan belt had broken and he was going to fix it and exchange it later. While I was backing out I scraped another truck that been parked behind me a little too close. When I pulled up I noticed that I had not done any damage, so I went on. After lunch we went to the Bechyal Cultural Center on the other side of the island at the end of a road that leads off from her school. It was really interesting. It had been built on the ocean in a coconut grove next to a village. It had a Men’s House, family house, stone seats, stone money and everything else that would have been in an original Yap village.

We went back to the huts and rested until supper at the family’s house. We always passed the old aunt’s home and there are always a lot of ladies there weaving, sitting around and chewing betel nut. The old ones must smash theirs because of their lack of teeth and you can hear them doing that all day. We ate fried fish, rice, fish-head soup, and boiled yams. When we were finished, Martin and Walter went on the porch. Walter took a large pot off the stove that had been used to boil water to pluck a chicken. (Chickens run wild on the island and anyone can kill them for a meal.) They sat out there and Walter plucked it in a basket. He had killed it with a pellet gun and was planning to get another on that night. They were going to have a lot of company the next day and needed two of them to feed everyone. Suzie and I walked back to the huts and turned in for the night.

Friday, January 8

I went to Clara and Martin’s home with Suzie for breakfast as usual. Clara had left cold fish for us in the refrigerator. I ate a piece with rice and soy sauce. Then Suzie and I went to her school. It was Culture Day since it was Friday, and all the students were involved making things. The students made me a neuneu and Suzie a headband with flowers and palm leaves. After school we went back to the huts for a while. We ate canned tuna with peas and carrots over rice for lunch at the house. Not much going on in the afternoon.

That evening at 5:30p.m. or so we drove into Colonia. We met several of Suzie’s friends at O’Keefes restaurant and bar. We sat around talking on the porch and ordered a whole barbecued chicken. They served it cut into pieces in a palm leaf basket. Disposable like our paper plates. Stayed there until around 11:00p.m. then Suzie and her friend, Rhoda, brought me back to the hut and they left again for a night out. They were planning to spend the night at Rhoda’s in Colonia.

Saturday, January 9

I woke up before dawn and waited until sunrise to get up. Opened the hut door and watched the orange sun come up over the ocean. I made some instant coffee like I did each morning and admired the beautiful surroundings. Suzie was still gone by 9:00a.m. I was hungry so I found a coconut behind the hut and tried to open it using a stick in the ground like Suzie had told me it was done. Finally got the husk off and took it to the hut to punch a hole in the eye to drink the water. After the water was gone I used her machete to break it into two pieces. Then scraped the coconut meat out with my pocketknife. Everything worked out and I enjoyed my breakfast.

When Suzie got back from her night out I was eating the coconut meat. She didn’t believe that I did it all myself. Quite an accomplishment! It was raining so we waited until about 10:00a.m. to go to the house. I ate boiled tapioca root and canned mackerel with tomatoes, boiled squash, and some raw onion slices. Really quite good!

Walter took us in Martin’s boat around the island. Walter, Suzie, Victor, and I went. We saw interesting villages and mangrove forests from the boat. We saw a Japanese causeway and went through German Cut where we stopped under a bridge while Suzie and I went up the bank and down a road to a small grocery store. I bought a 12 pack of beer and 2 cokes. We went back to the boat and kept going to O’Keefe’s Island. In the early 1800 Captain O’Keefe and his family had used the island for a home and a place to dry copra for trade. He became very rich from his plan to acquire stone money from Palau and sell it to the Yap natives. All that is left on the island today of his is a huge stone cistern, some brick steps and a bunch of bricks scattered around where the house once stood. He was really an interesting character. He called himself “His Majesty O’Keefe King of Yap.” Suzie swam a little on the other side of the island then we left to see some more sights.

We went to Walter’s village and saw an old canoe that was under a shed by the water. There were several of his relatives there. When we left they gave us a several tangerines to take with us. We passed Clara’s brother’s hut which is built on stilts at the water’s edge beside the mangroves. Walter says that he didn’t live there all of the time but comes there with his family to fish. Sounds like camping out to me. Then we went into the harbor at Colonia. Saw nice houses and a shanty town called something like Madrid, New Mexico but was not. The shanty town is on the land where the Spanish had originally settled, but many of the huts were on stilts out in the water. Only the outer islanders stay there, since they are in a lower caste than the Yap Islanders. I talked to four guys who were standing by a boat tied up across the road from the police station. Walter didn’t know what language they spoke. I tried Chinese, but one of them spoke to me in English and told me that they were Vietnamese from Indonesia. They had been there two months and planned to sail for the US. From the looks of their boat they will not make it!

When we returned we went back to our huts and took a nice, long nap. It began raining again! In the afternoon one of the ladies from Suzie’s school brought us some bananas, oranges, and a papaya. She lived down the beach and comes with her little boy to visit.

Around 6:30p.m. we went to the house for supper. Martin and Walter were sitting on the porch chewing betel nut, Josephine was in the garden picking flowers and Clara was making neuneus for the Japanese tourists that were coming the next day to spend a week at the huts to scuba dive. They were going to be in all of the huts except Suzie’s. We decided to check on hotel accommodations in Colonia for the next four nights. On Thursday night Suzie’s friend, Rhoda, has invited us to stay at her house before we go on the plane to Ulithi, one of the outer islands. It leaves at 7:00a.m. daily and would be easier for us to get to the airport from there.

For supper we had raw tuna and onions (I only ate a very small bite of it, but it was good), fried tuna pieces, rice, and left-over fish-head soup. Suzie was very tired from swimming and the boat trip. She also had gotten a little sun burned on her back so we went back to the huts and turned in.

Sunday, January 10

I woke up before dawn as usual and just lay there until dawn. Made coffee and tried to keep a kitten out of the hut. The kitten was really hungry and was meowing like crazy. Finally, she gave up on me feeding her and chased lizards on the beach. I ate a banana, green tangerines, and oranges for breakfast. A lady who lived down the beach brought us a large lobster in a plastic bag. She said her husband had caught it the night before. When Suzie got up we took it to the house and boiled it in a big pot for about 25 minutes until it turned red. I ate 1/2 of it with rice and soy sauce with a little raw onion. Suzie ate the other half. It was really good! After breakfast we packed our stuff and drove to Colonia. I rented a room at the Ocean View Hotel for $44 a night. It was nice to have a hot shower and air conditioning! We took a walk down an ancient stone path that started behind the hotel. Then we had a cab driver that Suzie knew, Brad, take us to the largest stone money bank on the island. We had to pay $2.50 each to see it. We also went up a hill to see an old Japanese gun that was still there. It was in a hole dug out by the soldiers. The barrel had been blown up by the Americans when they overtook the island in the 1940’s. It was interesting to see that the villagers had made a taro patch beside it.

We picked up some more beer and snacks and went back to the room to get cool. Suzie called Clara and told her that we were going to stay in Colonia for a few days. She said Clara sounded a little down because she had just taken a fruit bat out of the freezer for our supper. Walter had killed it some time ago and she was saving it for a special occasion. Oh well!

We went to Rhoda’s house for supper. She lived in Colonia not far from the hotel where we were staying. A nurse friend of hers from Australia, she, Suzie and I had a good supper that Rhoda cooked mahi mahi chunks cooked with carrots and squash pieces soaked in coconut milk. She first put in chopped onions, garlic, and fresh ginger root. Her friend brought a cheesecake with raspberry sauce. It seemed like being home for a change. (I got a really bad stomachache that night from eating the food!)

We got back to the hotel around 10:30p.m. and Suzie said she was going to the 24hr laundry down the street. I asked her to take my washing too, since I had a lot of dirty clothes as well. After she left I thought about how nice it was to have a real bed and air conditioning for a change. I dozed off and woke up a little later. Suzie was not back yet. I was really worried about her. I stayed awake until 4:30a.m. when she finally came back to the room. She said that she had been at the laundry all that time since there were so many people there and she had to wait her turn. She also said she had been hanging out with her friends. While I was laying there wondering about where she might be, I had decided that I could not be worried every night we were in Colonia. Although she said it was safe, I was still worried about her out in the car by herself all night long. I also felt responsible for the car as long as we had it. There was no insurance on the car and I was sure if it had been wrecked that I would have been responsible for it. She also told me that she is not supposed to drive as a Peace Corp Volunteer. I guess that is why she only drove around at night and on small outlying roads. She has me to drive in town. I had decided to see if I could get a plane out on Wednesday and go back to the states. I thought that she could tell her family that I wasn’t feeling well and I was sure they would understand.

When I told her my plans she literally blew up! She said that I would make her look bad in front of her family and all of the islanders. She said she had gone to a lot of trouble for me and that it wasn’t any way to treat her. She left the room in a rage. In about 2 or 3 hrs. she came back and went to bed.

Around 8:30a.m. I got up and got ready to go to the Inauguration activities for the new governor. It was a state holiday and the new governor, lt. governor and legislators were to be installed at 9:00a.m. I left the room and walked down to the park where everything was set up. A little while later, Rhoda came up and asked me where Suzie was. She said that she was supposed to call her at 9:00a.m. but didn’t. I told her that she was still in bed since she had been out all night and just got in. In a little bit Suzie showed up. She was all smiles and went over and sat with her friends. We all watched the inauguration ceremonies then it was time for lunch. (An interesting note: The governor and lt. governor’s wives were on the stage with their husbands as they took the oath of office. According to the constitution everyone in the ceremony must dress in their native costumes. This is a loincloth and thu, for the men and a lava-lava skirt for the women. It does not include a top of any kind for anyone. The women do wear neuneus though. I thought of how it would be in Texas when the governor was sworn in at the state capital. Quite a sight!

Suzie told me if I was still leaving I should go to the Continental Airlines office in the building down the street to make arrangements. Her friends were going to by lunch at a local vendor and she asked me if I wanted to go. We walked over to the vendor’s stand and everything there was fried and looked greasy. It didn’t look good to me, so I told her that I was going back to the room to eat some bread and fruit that we had there. I went to the Continental office, back to the room for lunch and went to bed to take a nap before the dancing began in the afternoon.

About 1-2 hours later she came storming into the room and told me I was ruining her reputation that she had worked so hard for. She told me all of the culturally insensitive things I had done. She began picking up all of her things in the room and said she hadn’t washed my clothes the night before and pulled them out of her bag and threw them on the bed. She looked for her keys, found them and said she couldn’t stay in the room with me anymore and gave me the name and phone number of the guy that owned the rental car. She left to call a cab from downstairs and told me if I needed anything to call her at her school. Then she dragged her stuff down the stairs.

A little later I went down to call Al about the car and she was still waiting for a cab in the restaurant. A little later it came and she left without a word. I called Al and his secretary answered and took the message to pick up the car when he got back from town. I got my washing powder out of the car and went back upstairs. I planned to walk to the washateria down the street tomorrow. I also planned to be a tourist for the next couple of days until Wednesday when the next plane leaves for Guam.

Tuesday, January 12

I woke up around 8:00a.m. after being awake and staying in bed from about 4:30a.m. or so. Made coffee and went downstairs to drink it by the little restaurant. Talked with Joe the owner for a while. The I walked to the washateria and waited about an hour for two ladies to finish with their washing. There were three washers and four dryers there. While waiting I went into several of the little shops and stores in the shopping center. I ate breakfast, a cream filled doughnut and a can of mango juice. When my clothes were finished I walked back to the hotel and made some hot blackberry tea, read and napped.

In the afternoon I ate some fruit and bread in the room and walked around Colonia taking pictures of all of the buildings, etc. Went to the post office and sent a couple of postcards. Came back to the hotel and read about Micronesia.

Around 6:30p.m. or so I went back to the Filipino restaurant and ate some garlic rice and soup with small bits of chicken and cabbage in it. While I was there the Yapese owner came in from spear fishing with two medium sized tuna. He went into the back room and came out with a baby sea bird (Booby?) on his arm. He took it outside in the front of the restaurant and fed it some of the tuna while being watched by a cat the whole while. After supper I walked back to the hotel stopping a little while to watch the sunset on the harbor at the bridge between the restaurant and the hotel. Talked with a little boy on the way and went back to the room around 7:30p.m. to read.

Wednesday, January 13

I woke up around 7:00a.m. read and ate breakfast of coffee, tangerines, and bananas in the room. I had to vacate room by 9:00a.m. I left my bag at the desk and picked it up when I went to the airport at 2:00p.m. The room will cost $132 for the three nights stay ($44/night).

Got downstairs and the owner, Joe Tamag, told me that I could leave my things in my room until I left for the airport if I wanted to since no one was going to move in right away so I took my things back upstairs.

I went downstairs and was walking to town when Suzie’s cab driver friend, Brad, drove by. He stopped and asked me if I wanted him to take me to see the Japanese Zeros by the old airport. I asked him how much it would cost and he told me $15/hour. So, I went. We drove south through an interesting village or two, by his house and then by the high school. Across from the high school are two old concrete towers that were built by the Germans when they were on the island before WWI. From there we went to a store where I had to give a man $2.50 to see the Zeros. They were behind the weather station and almost completely grown over by weeds. There was also a Japanese anti-aircraft gun close by. We drove down the old runway and he told me about a Boing 727 that lost a wheel while landing and ran off into the jungle in the 1980s. We looked but couldn’t see it for all the underbrush.

From there we stopped by a village he knew. We went up to see an old man who was sitting on his porch. He was the chief of the village. Brad put a rope ring around his feet and showed me how to climb to the top of a betel nut tree. He cut a stem of them and brought them down for his later use. He had to give the old man some for allowing him to climb the tree. He also pointed out an old outside oven beside the house.

Then we drove to the coast through a huge grove of coconut trees with the road lined with coleus. What a sight! Saw several grass and bamboo huts along the beach that were rented out to tourists. On the way back we saw a fruit bat fly across the road right in front of us. I asked him if he had eaten one and he said that he had eaten them many times. I asked him what it tasted like and he said, “fruit bat.” I guess that I doesn’t taste like anything else that he knew of especially not like chicken. We stopped off at his house and he climbed a tangerine tree and tossed down about eight for me then he took me back to the hotel in Colonia. Really was a nice morning to be out, no rain but cloudy skies.

I sat in the restaurant at the hotel reading about O’Keefe. Ate lunch there-ramen soup with cabbage with pieces of spam and fresh tangerines. I was worried about getting on the plane to Guam since there were many people going back to other islands after the ceremonies, but Joe said not to worry since he had called a friend at the airport and had me placed number one on the waiting list.

At 2:00p.m. he had a driver take me to the airport. I was the first one there and sure enough I was number one on the standby list. Joe even showed up for a minute or two and wished me a safe journey. Everyone I met on Yap were really nice to me. They seem to go out of their way to make visitors feel comfortable.

When the plane came in I boarded. As it lifted off for Guam at 4:00 p.m. I felt a little sad to be leaving but was ready to get back to the more civilized world that I am accustomed to. I had a feeling of real isolation there even though it is truly a tropical paradise. Reminded me of what Suzie said she was going to title a book about Yap that she was going to write- “Prisoner in Paradise.”

Observations about Yap:

• There are no street signs or highway signs except the ones that post the speed limit.

They are usually 25mph and no one observes them.

• Everyone chews betel nut. I even saw a 3yr. old kid take one from her mother’s purse and begin sucking on it. It was too big for her to chew without being broken open. This makes everyone’s teeth turn black and their mouths bright red. They also spit everywhere. The concrete in public places is painted red so you can’t tell where everyone has been spitting. (I first noticed it on the concrete at the airport.)

• Everyone wears rubber flip-flops. All other shoes do not dry out soon enough and would be uncomfortable and rot in no time. I had to throw away a pair of tennis shoes that I brought with me that smelled really bad!

• Only the women and men from the outer islands wear the traditional dress- grass skirts or lava-lavas for women and loincloths or thus for men. There are a lot of them in Colonia however visiting relatives on the main island. During special government occasions like the governor’s inauguration ceremonies, everyone in the ceremony must dress in native costume.

• The villages are made up of houses that are separated from each other by jungle growth. I was told that palm trees usually mark the property lines. It is very dark at night and few of the roads are paved. The roads are also very muddy since it usually has rained at least once every day

• There are a lot of pieces of stone money scattered throughout the island in the villages.

• Chickens run everywhere.

• Dogs are everywhere, but don’t pay you any attention when you walk by them.

• Some people own pigs, but other than chickens no farm animals are to be seen.

Thursday, January 14/Wednesday, January 13

This is the same day for me since I crossed the International Dateline. Got a good night’s sleep at the Mai Ana Hotel in Guam. Woke up at 5:00a.m. then to the airport at 6:00a.m. by complimentary van. Breakfast at Burger King in the airport (egg croissant & coffee), on to the plane and in the air by 7:40a.m. I will be in the air 6.5 hrs. but will cross the International Dateline by the time we reach Hawaii. We also went back four time zones, so was 6:30p.m. when we got to Honolulu. To me it was 1:30p.m., so it is a little confusing to the internal time clock.

Got to Honolulu without any problems. Changed my flight for the weekend which cost an extra $75. Caught a shuttle bus to Waikiki. Got to the hotel where I had reservations for next week and they were all booked up. They called another hotel a few blocks away and got me a room in a better hotel for the same price ($72/night). I walked about 5 or 6 blocks to the hotel. Went to my room, made some hot tea, took a shower, washed two shirts, and watched TV in bed. Felt good to be back in civilization.

Second Thursday, January 14

Got up at 6:30a.m. and made calls home to let everyone know I was coming home a week early. Got dressed and went to the lobby to pay for a day tour of the island. The driver, Leo, came at 8:00a.m. Others were picked up from various other hotels. They were from Australia, New Zealand and Calgary, Canada- ten in all. We went to Diamond Head Crater and Lookout, the Halona Blow hole, and saw Chinaman’s Hat rock formation in the ocean. It was raining in the mountains, but it didn’t rain on us when we got out of the bus. We went to Kualoa Ranch and Secret Island. Saw where many places where motion pictures and TV show have been filmed including Godzilla, Mighty Joe Young and Jurassic Park. Also saw a replica of a native Hawaiian village. Went into a pre-WWII bunker built in the side of a mountain. When we went to Secret Island, I learned to weave a fish, a grasshopper, and a bird from palm leaves. Played table tennis with one of the kids while others swam, snorkeled, canoed, played beach volleyball and laid around in hammocks. Everyone had a lot of fun! On the way back we stopped at a couple of tourist places where there were small stores, a glass blowing shop, a surfing museum, and the Dole store in a pineapple field. I ate a pineapple ice cream cone with a piece of pineapple in it.

Got back to the hotel around 6:00p.m. I took a shower and went down to the market/shopping district a few blocks away. Got Chinese food from a little take-out place and sat on bench outside to eat it. Went back to the hotel for a couple of beers in the bar and went upstairs for the night.

Friday, January 15

Got up late at 8:30a.m. Went across the street to Denny’s. Had eggs, bacon, tomato, toast, and coffee. At 10:00a.m. a tour bus picked me up at the hotel and took me to the Polynesian Culture Center. It is operated by the Mormon church. All of the students from Polynesia are offered full scholarships at the university if they will participate in the cultural villages and pageant at the center. There are students from Tahiti, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, New Zealand, Marquesas, and Hawaii. We stayed all day visiting each village, taking a boat ride, and walking through the park. I ate a buffet supper and went to the show “Horizons” that lasted from 7:30p.m. - 9:30p.m. It was an excellent performance! Went to the bus and in about an hour we were back in Waikiki. Well worth it!

Saturday, January 16

I took a tour of the Arizona Memorial at 10:00a.m. Woke up at 7:30a.m. or so and went to Denny’s for a “grand slam” breakfast. Took a tour bus to the memorial. Saw a movie about the bombing, went to the museum and took a boat ride to the Arizona. Very moving! 1,177 men are still entombed in the ship as it rests on the bottom of Pearl Harbor. They haven’t moved the ship since the attack on December 7, 1941.

On the way back to the hotel we saw the “Punchbowl” and the cities of Honolulu and Waikiki. Got off the bus and walked down Waikiki beach and ate at a Chinese fast-food restaurant in the international shopping area. Went back to the hotel, got my luggage, and caught a van to the airport. Went through check-in around 4:00p.m. Went to a flight museum in the airport. Read something that Isuo Matsuo, a 23yr old kamikaze pilot in Leyte wrote, “---May our death be as sudden and clean as the shattering of a crystal.”

The plane boarded at 7:15p.m. and left at 8:00p.m. Didn’t get off the ground until around 9:00p.m. since one of the passengers had to be taken off because of a medical emergency. Flew all night and got to Houston around 8:15a.m. Houston time. Brenda was there to pick me up at the gate. What a trip! I really learned a lot and have been places that I would not have gone otherwise. A great experience!

Chapter 21 - My RV Trip - (another log account)

I lived in the apartment on Wilcrest Ave. with Brenda until February,1999. I had decided that since I was fully retired, I wanted a different life. On December 4, 1998, I bought a 30' 1999 Coachmen Leprechaun. I got it at Holiday World in Houston. They wanted about $60K for it and I got it for $48K since it is the end of the year and they didn't want to carry it over as inventory into 1999. They stored it for me until the end of February when I planned to move into it from the apartment before March 1. I had a tow bar put on my VW van so that I could tow it behind the RV when I travelled. I looked forward to the experience!

When I returned from a visit to see my mother in Houston, I picked up the RV and moved to Trader’s Village on Eldridge Rd. in Houston. I lived there until I left Houston for good in June,1999. I asked Brenda if she wanted to travel with me and she said that she didn’t. She wanted to stay in Houston.

In March I paid the rent until the end of the month plus a reletting fee. That meant that we had to move out of the apartment by the end of the month. I hired movers to move Brenda's furniture out of the apartment on the 20th. I spent several days working at Brenda's house painting, fixing the toilet, etc. in her bedroom and bathroom. I wanted it to be habitable for her when she moved back. Brenda moved back into her house along with her daughter Casie and husband Tyson. Casie had not worked since August and Tyson was planning to get a job with his uncle in the oil field tool business. I don’t know whatever happened to them.

In 1999 I left Houston for a cross-country RV trip. I had two RV destinations in mind. One was to go to Hardin, Montana to see the reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand and to Calgary, Canada to go to the Stampede rodeo. I picked up my high school friend, Carter Frank in Denver (he was attending a Recyclers Convention; he had a couple of junk car lots in Houston and they met somewhere every year) and we drove north. I got to both events that were on my agenda. I left Carter in Billings, Montana to fly back to Houston and continued to see the sights in Canada, Montana, California, and Nevada.

On June 28 I went from Hardin to the Arrow Creek Trading Post on the Crow Indian Reservation for a couple of days. The trading post is near Pryor, about 14 miles south of Billings. I was invited there by the owner, Marla Little Light who I met the evening before at the street dance in downtown Hardin. She, a lady friend of hers and I went to a Mexican night club down the street. We were trying to get away from her cousin who was one of the street ladies of Hardin who was after me. We had a good time dancing to the Mexican music. That is when she invited me to her trading post. She invited me to park in the driveway to her house which was behind the trading post. Her trading post was something new in the area and in addition to it there would be an Indian market in a nearby building that was built for tanning hides in the Indian manner where Indians will bring handicrafts to sell to the public. It should be a successful endeavor, since there was nothing else like it around there.

I really enjoyed the visit. Learned a lot about the Crow people. I especially enjoyed Marla’s five-year old granddaughter, Lafonda. She was a really cute little girl! She was staying there with her dad, Marla’s son. Her mother was a Mexican and her dad was Crow. They didn’t get along very well and Marla had custody of her. Marla said that she was going to make a real Indian princess out of her!

Marla and I enjoyed listening to Cajun music and dancing in her living room. She was quite a lady! That afternoon I took her into Billings to her banker. She found out that she qualified for a $1/2 million loan to upgrade her trading post and Indian market. She told me that her property on the reservation was valued at $3.5 million. Pretty rich lady! We had a very nice evening together dancing in her living room and drinking wine! We spent some time together in my RV parked in front of her house.

July,1999

From Butte I went south then north by way of the Big Hole Battlefield and up the Bitterroot River. The Big Hole Battlefield is where Colonel Gibbon’s troops surprised the Nez Perce Indians as they were leaving their reservation in Idaho. The troops attacked the Indians one morning while they were still in their teepees. It was a riot until the Indians regrouped and killed many of the soldiers and volunteers with their deadly accurate rifle fire. They pinned them down with heavy fire until Chief Joseph with the women and children could get away. This was the first major battle between the US troops and the Nez Perce as they fled to Canada. Chief Joseph’s saga continued from there through Yellowstone National Park and finally only a few miles from the Canadian border in the Bear Paw Mountains where they gave up and were moved back to the reservations.

The next few days I spent in Kalispell. I was there over the 4th of July and saw a parade and heard a lot of fireworks all that night. Rained like crazy all night. Went to a little dance hall called the Blue Moon and had a good time. One day I went to the little town of Whitefish. They were having a festival on the town square and had a visiting postal train commemorating their new postage stamp. Went through the train and enjoyed all of the exhibits. Met an old man sitting at a table listening to a folk singer. His name was Everett Kelch and said he was a poet. He told me a couple of poems of his and seeing I was interested he went back to his house for two books and a tape of his poems. I bought them from him and have enjoyed them!

Leaving Kalispell I went to Glacier National Park. Stayed at a KOA in the little town of St. Mary. Got up early one morning and drove on the “Road to the Sun” through the park to West Glacier and back. Was a beautiful day and the ride was really spectacular!

On July 7 I left Glacier Park and went to Canada. Crossed the border in the middle of nowhere going to Carson, Alberta. When I got to the border the guard only asked me where I was going, what I was carrying and how long I was going to stay. I told him and he said OK, no I.D. or anything. Surprised me!

I drove a few miles and went to Fort McCleod. Not far from there is the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. It is a site that has been used by the Indians to drive the buffalo off of a cliff for butchering. It has been used for about 7,000 years or so. Is a World Heritage site. Was interesting thinking about how people had used that same spot for so long. After a couple of hours at the site I drove on to Calgary where I got at the Pine Creek RV Park. Stayed there for four days while I took in the sights and activities at Calgary.

On Friday, July 9, I went to the opening day parade downtown. Rode the light rail train from Anderson station not far from the RV park. The parade route was about five people deep on the route. A very long parade; floats and horses. While I was downtown I went to Chinatown and had lunch. They have a very large Chinatown downtown. Also saw some Native Americans square dance at their center. They were having a pancake breakfast. Various groups hold pancake breakfasts and barbecue suppers for the public during the two weeks of Stampede.

The next day, Saturday, I rode the train to the Stampede ground. Stayed there all day. Went to all the exhibits, etc. The rodeo is in the afternoon then went to the Chuck wagon races in the evening. The day before a Chuck wagon driver was thrown from his wagon and died of head injuries a couple of days later. They also had to kill one of his horses that was injured. That was the talk of the town while I was there. After the races there is entertainment on a portable stage and fireworks. Got home late and was very tired!

I left Calgary for Banff on July 12. Stayed in Banff and drove to see Lake Louise. Quite a breathtaking sight! None other like it in the world. Deep blue lake, mountains and a glacier-unbelievable! Glad I took my van there instead of the RV. Tons of people and not enough parking.

From Banff I went to Hope, BC. Hope is a little town close to the U.S. border. It is renowned for its log chainsaw sculptures. They are on every corner downtown and all over the central park in the center of town. Lots of tourist busses there to see them. Even had one from Taiwan. I surprised some of the folks by speaking Chinese to them on the square.

I got back into the U.S. on July 14 at the border crossing at Sumas, Washington. It is a very small ranching community. The border patrolman asked me where I was from. I said Texas and he said have a good day and I kept on driving. Went to the ferry site across from Port Townsend. Went across on a 30 min. ferry. Cost me $40 to take the RV and van. The other ferries in Canada to Vancouver Island would have cost me over $100 each and I would have had to have taken two of them!

I drove to Port Angeles where I stayed for four days. While I was there I went over to Victoria, BC on the ferry; drove up to Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park; went to the hot springs and drove through the Hoh Rain Forest. I was glad to leave there though. It was either raining and always cold and foggy.

I left there early on the morning of July,18 and drove around the Olympic Peninsula to Randle. Randle is at the north entrance to Mt. St. Helens National Monument. Drove the van 30 miles up a winding mountain road to the base of Mt. St. Helens. What a sight! It has been 20 years since the eruption in 1980 and there is still a lot of destruction on the mountain. Spirit Lake is still 1/3 full of floating logs that were brought down the mountainside by the eruption. We were told that 98 percent of the plants that were there before the eruption have returned, not in the same numbers of course!

From Randle I went to Warrenton outside of Astoria, Oregon. On July,19 I went to the Lewis & Clark Interpretive center on Point Disappointment and saw the spot on the Washington side where the Corps of Discovery was camped before moving across the Columbia River to their winter quarters at Fort Clatsop. Visited the fort and an old Victorian house in Astoria. Also went through the Maritime Museum there.

Drove down the Oregon coast on July 22 on Hwy 101. Really beautiful sights, but again was foggy and cold most of the time. Trees are close to the highway so you can’t see anything until you get to a viewing spot on the highway. Stayed in Lincoln City and drove the rest of the coast the next day. I saw the Sea Lion Caves which were really interesting. There are hundreds of sea lions and thousands of sea birds on the rocks. Quite a sight!

Left the coast and went inland to Oakridge, Oregon. Stayed at a RV park that was also a trailer park on July,24. All of their RV parks were like that. Only people I saw looked like they were from deep East Texas. Not much industry except logging there. Glad to leave and go to Ft. Klamath to stay for the visit to Crater Lake. That is really a wonder! The volcano that formed Crater Lake was called Mazama. About 7,700 years ago it blew up and then the caldera collapsed. The large amount of rain and snow that the area gets each year filled it up and it has become the deepest lake in the U.S. It has no rivers leading in or out of it and is a deep cobalt blue. Unbelievable! Also went to ride on a 1/8-gauge railroad train out of Chiloquin. Fun!

From the Crater Lake area I drove to Reno, Nevada on July 26. There are a lot of things to see in that area. The town of Reno is pretty sleezy. I stayed in a downtown RV park that wasn’t so bad. Walked to the downtown area which was about four blocks from the RV park. The main street downtown is mostly casinos, pawn shops and hotels. Some of the hotels with casinos seemed to be nice, but many of them were pretty dumpy. Lots of sleezy characters on the streets there too. The National Automobile Museum is there in town, but I didn’t go see it. Not a place I wanted to be, so I went back to the RV park.

Other sights that I went to see out of Reno were Lake Tahoe, Carson City and Virginia City. I drove to see Lake Tahoe. The lake is pretty, but there are so many commercial businesses and fancy houses around it that it is really a resort lake. Nothing like the tranquilness of Crater Lake.

Carson City is the state capital. There are a lot of businesses there and some sights of interest. It is a very modern city, not that much different from many others that are throughout the nation. They have a railroad museum and an excellent state museum. Since Carson City was once one of the U.S. mints, the museum has a lot of things pertaining to the days that the state mined much of the silver and gold and minted coins. There are also many artifacts of the state’s Native American tribes and some exhibits of the plant and animal life that had lived in the state. They had an excellent extinct mammoth and horse exhibit with other fossils that have been found around the state.

Virginia City was an interesting town. During the 1800’s it was the home of the Comstock Mines where millions of dollars’ worth of gold and silver were mined. President U.S. Grant even visited the town to tell them how much the nation appreciated their efforts to mine the precious metals. The town was quite large then and even had an opera house, Piper’s, where many famous people of the time performed. The house is now operated by a historical society. There is still a railroad with a steam engine, the Virginia & Truckee Railroad, that you can ride for three miles to Gold Hill and back. It also has an old high school that was the first to have indoor plumbing west of the Mississippi River.

Leaving Reno on July 29 I drove what is known as the “Loneliest Road in America.” The highway goes from east to west across the state of Nevada from Reno to the Utah border. It traverses what is called the Great Basin. Even though the road is called lonely it has several small towns, each with a historic past. The Great Basin area is centered in Nevada but extends from California's Sierra Nevada Range on the west to the Wasatch Mountains of Utah on the east. The area is called the Great Basin, because water from the mountains and valleys only pools in the area and does not go to either the Pacific Ocean or to the Atlantic Ocean. It is made up of mountain ranges and dried up lake basins that were once full of water when the area's glaciers melted about 12,000 years ago.

I stopped at an old mining town of Ely. From Ely you can see many interesting sights. The Great Basin National Park is about seventy miles away. The park is in the Snake Mountain Range. From the visitor center I drove up to the base of Wheeler Peak and took a hiking tour of about a mile and a half up to one of the Bristlecone Pine groves on the mountain. The Bristlecone pines are the oldest living organisms on the planet. Some of them have been dated to over 4,000 years. They live at around 11,000 feet up the mountain where the weather is always cold. The weather at that elevation on the mountain is very severe and the trees are very twisted with much dead wood. They are not really close together and seem to grow right out of the rocks that litter the landscape left over from the time that the glaciers retreated around 12,000 years ago.

I also went into the Lehman caves. They are made of limestone and go back into the mountain about three miles. They are quite full of stalactites, stalagmites, draperies, columns, flowstone, and soda straws. They were discovered by Absalom Lehman who was a miner and rancher in the area and have been opened to the public for a long time. In the past some of the tourists were not as considerate of the formations as they are today. There is evidence of many of the tips of some of the formations being broken off. You can see however that some of them have begun to grow back by the evidence of the small growths that have been allowed to grow in the last twenty years since they have been protected.

Other things of interest around Ely are the garnet mines at Garnet Hill where you can dig for garnets, the Ruth Copper Mine which is the largest operating copper mine in Nevada and the Nevada Northern Railway Museum which operates scheduled trains called the “Ghost Train of Old Ely” for tourists all summer. I rode an evening run which is called “Sunset at Steptoe,” named after the Steptoe Valley. It is a once a year run at the end of July that provides candlelight, wine and hors d’oeuvres as it travels during the Nevada sunset.

August, 1999

On August, 1I drove from Ely to Moab. Moab is a neat town with lots of things to do. The town is geared to the tourist trade, so has lots of restaurants, stores, etc. downtown. Outside of town there are many sights to see. Arches National Park is just at the outskirts of town. I went there at 7 a.m. and enjoyed hiking some of the many trails in the area. Went to a performance of “Canyonlands by Night” on the Colorado River. There is a Dutch oven supper and Bar BQ with a couple of singers to entertain the group before leaving. Then everyone boards a boat on the river and goes upriver in the canyons north of town. A light crew goes upriver and when you get to a predesignated place, they begin a light show on the canyon walls. They play a tape of music and talk about the area. The light truck goes a little ahead of the boat on the canyon road keeping up the light show for about an hour. Really beautiful and inspirational!

The next day I took a side trip down the road in the canyon to Fisher Towers. It is about 25 miles out of Moab in the desert and canyonlands. The road to the Towers goes about 3 miles then dead ends into the trailhead. Is very desolate. No one for miles around. All I could hear was the ringing in my ears and the birds. I didn't hike since I was by myself and no one knew where I was.

From Moab I drove to Page, Arizona, my next destination on August 4. You must drive through many canyons and plains to get there. On the way you go through Monument Valley and pass by Natural Bridges National Monument; the Edge of the Cedars State Park in Blanding, Utah; the Ute Indian Reservation; Hovenweep National Monument; Mexican Hat Rock; and Navajo National Monument. The road is a good one but goes up and down many inclines and depressions caused by millions of years of erosion.

Page is a town that was created when the workers built the Glen Canyon Dam to slow the flow of the Colorado River and create Lake Powell. Lake Powell fills up huge areas of the once deep Glen Canyon. I took a five-hour boat trip from the Waweep Marina on the lake. The boat went several miles up the canyons to the Rainbow Bridge Arch. It is the tallest natural arch in the world and is quite impressive. It can only be reached by hiking trails, or by water. There are no roads leading to it. It is also a sacred site for the area’s Indians, and no one is supposed to walk under it. Back in Page I went to an Indian dance exhibition on the Courthouse grounds. It was performed by one family of Indians who were Hadasta-Mandan who are originally from the Dakotas. They were two of the tribes that Lewis and Clark found on their trip up the Missouri River. In fact, they spent their first winter in the Mandan villages close to Bismarck, North Dakota at Fort Mandan. I went to Ken’s Western Club and Restaurant in Page that evening and saw a Navajo Indian that I had met at the dance exhibition who was himself an Indian dancer.

On August 6 I drove from Page to Flagstaff, Arizona. On the way I took a side trip to the south rim of the Grand Canyon. It is such an awesome sight that there are no words to describe it! You just keep looking at it in wonder! I stayed there until August 9. Flagstaff is only about sixty or so miles south of the Grand Canyon. It lies in a high desert ponderosa pine forest. The town is almost 7,000 feet above sea level, so it has very nice summer weather. Between the high 70’s in the daytime and mid 50’s at night. There are many sights in and around town. The people of Flagstaff were having a Summer Festival the weekend that I was there, so I spent much of Saturday looking around the festival grounds. Other sights that I went to see that day were the Museum of Northern Arizona, where they have documented many of the archeological and paleontological historical aspects of the region; the downtown area; and the Pioneer Museum which documents the settling of the area by the white men. The next morning, I went to the Sunset Volcano and Wapiti National Monuments. That evening drove only a little way out of town to Walnut Canyon National Monument.

Sunset Volcano is quite a volcano. It erupted in the area only a few thousand years ago and disrupted the lives of the native Americans who lived there. The area around the volcano is black or red with cinders. The cinder field also has only a few trees growing on it. Quite a sight! Wapiti National Monument was the remains of a Sinagua pueblo. It is well preserved and has been rebuilt to some extent.

Walnut Canyon is another Sinagua site. The site is made up of pueblo dwellings under the cliffs straight down into a deep canyon. You must walk several hundred steps down into the canyon to get there. Very impressive, especially when you realize that people lived down there, raising children, growing old, finding, and growing food, etc., it is hard to believe that that was their world. There was a grave found at the site that was a man with many artifacts buried with him. Hopi Indians were brought in to identify the artifacts. They recognized many of the things that were buried with the man and even knew the clan to which he belonged. I guess that proves a link between some of the ancient pueblo dwellers and the modern ones.

The next day I drove through Oak Creek Canyon to Sedona. Sedona has very beautiful views. It is in a canyon with red rocks all around. The whole town is too touristy to me though. It is all commercial! From there went to the Tuzigoot National Monument and Montezuma Castle to see some more pueblo ruins. Some neat towns on the way are Cottonwood and Jerome. Both have mining histories. Jerome is a town that was completely built on the side of a mountain. It was a mining town and has been taken over by tourists, artists, and retirees. Lots of fun!

From the Flagstaff area I went to Canyon De Chelly on August,10. On the way I went to the Hopi Reservation. The Hopis have been in the area for over 2,000 years. They moved to the three mesas from other areas around there. They seemed to be the most conservative people of all in the area. You cannot take any pictures at all on the reservation. Most of them never adopted Christianity like many of the other pueblo people. They still perform dances and dress in their ceremonies like they have done since before the white man came to the area. I got the feeling that they would like to be left alone. I went through Second Mesa and out of the Hopi Reservation to get to Canyon De Chelly which is on the Navajo Reservation.

Canyon De Chelly is probably the most unique National Monument of all. It has history of the Navajo people from before the Spanish and the American times. Both encounters were disasters for the Navajo. It was the center of their world and still serves as home for many of them. Chinle is the Navajo town that is closest to it. An interesting thing about the National Monument is that it is free to visit to free for camping. I drove the south rim of the canyon in the evening. There were several places where you can drive up to the canyon for viewing. It is narrow with very steep red cliffs on each side. Navajos are still living at the bottom, raising crops and sheep.

Most interesting for me was the two and a half walk into the canyon to the pueblo ruins, White Castle, at the bottom. The trail is well marked and was a beautiful trip in the evening. The reward for getting to the bottom is the Sinagua ruins and the serenity of the river and trees. It is very quiet there and quite cool. There were a lot of Navajos taking walking down into the canyon. Most of them were women who do the trip a couple of times a week to stay in shape. Got up early the next day and drove to Gallup.

Chapter 22 - Meeting Susan

On August 11,1999 I arrived in Gallup, New Mexico. I drove into the KOA RV Park and was told that the Intertribal Indian Ceremonies was to be that weekend. I was on my way to Mesa Verde National Park but decided to stay for the ceremonies. That decision changed me for the rest of my life! I went to the pre-ceremony Bar BQ and jewelry showing. I got my plate of Bar BQ and sat down at a long table. At the table were only Navajo women and one White woman. She was sitting a few seats across from me at a long table eating Bar BQ as well. She moved to sit across from me, and we began to talk. Her name was Susan Knaebel and she was from Santa Fe. She was in Gallup to find a place to hold her meeting that she was to have later on for her employer, Neighborhood Housing of Santa Fe. She was their outreach coordinator and gave talks about housing issues around the northern part of the state. It was Friday evening and I asked her if she liked to C&W dance. She said she did, and I asked her out for Saturday night. She said she would go. The next day I found that there was a C&W dance hall in a strip mall in town. I met her at her motel, and we went dancing after supper. We were the only people there who were not Navajo. We were the first to get up and dance since the others all waited until they had had enough to drink before getting on the dance floor. We danced great together! She fit under my hat! After dancing for a couple of hours we drove out to Red Rock State Park just out of town. The moon was bright enough to see where we were going, so we walked out into the park beneath the red rocks. I had brought a blanket and we lay down to look at the stars. Since it was August, the Percids Meteor Shower was spectacular! We took it as a good sign for our relationship! I even wrote a poem about it the next day when I was in the area for the Ceremonials. I called it The Red Rock Star Trail:

The night was cold, not a cloud in the sky.

The air was crisp as bright meteors glided by.

Each with its fiery tail lighting a path in the sky

Above the Red Rock Star Trail.

Massive rocks rising high on each side above that sandy course

Glowing red by some mysterious source.

Two alone, no one else in sight

To savor the view late on that August night.

Shrouded with blankets to keep out the cold,

But warmed from within each body, so bold.

Feelings ran strong and passions were high

As two walked as one under the star-studded sky.

Stopping for brief moments for a tender embrace

As emotions surfaced in that magical place.

Finally, the soft sand became a resting place

As the two lay in a lover’s embrace.

As bodies touched on the blankets in that sandy dale,

Two hearts beat as one on the Red Rock Star Trail.

I took her back to her motel around 3a.m. Next morning at 11:00 we ate brunch and then she went on to her next destination, Farmington, to do a workshop the next day. I went to more of the Indian events. On Saturday, August,14 I went to the parade in the morning, an all-Indian rodeo in the afternoon, innumerable Indian events in the late afternoon and to the Ceremonials in the evening. They were over about 11:00pm or so. They crowned the queen, and each tribe performed their tribal dances. There were about fifteen or so tribes. Long night!

My next destination was northern New Mexico. I went to Aztec Ruins National Monument which is really a ruined pueblo of the people from Chaco Canyon. Really well preserved! Has the only restored Great Kiva in the Southwest. Then on to Chama on August ,16.

Chama, New Mexico is an old railroad town and has what they call the “Most Spectacular Steam Railroad,” the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad. Went on the day long trip to Antonito, Colorado and back. Was a lot of fun! Also, lots of coal dust and smoke all day. The train stopped half-way in Osier, Colorado where we had lunch. I had the Mexican food buffet. I was really hungry by the time we got there. There were some problems with one of the engines on the way from the half-way point so waited longer than expected. The total trip was from 8 a.m. until 5:30 p.m., so it was a long day.

I drove to Pagosa Springs, Colorado from Chama on August,18. A very beautiful drive beside the San Juan mountains. Pagosa Springs is named for the hot springs in the center of town. It is a really neat town! There are a lot of retirees and tourists, but not as much hype as either Telluride, Sedona, or Virginia City. Went to a wine, cheese, and salmon party under a tent in the rain given as a fund raiser for a new Community Center. Met a lot of interesting people there. I was invited to come visit a Beauty Salon on Hwy 160 by the owners. Went and had a wonderful one-hour massage for $45. Chilled out the rest of the day!

I went to the Chimney Rock Archeological site on August 20. Only a few miles out of Pagosa Springs. Really an impressive Chaco Anasazi site! You must go with a guide on the two-hour walking tour up to the top of the mountain where they built their ceremonial center. One of the best I have seen! Partly because you must walk into it instead of driving. You drive part of the way and walk the rest.

From Pagosa Springs I went to Cortez for a few of days. Lots of Anasazi ruins out of there. Went to the Anasazi Heritage Center in Delores and saw two more ruins, Dominquez and Escalante. Drove out to Hovenweep National Monument to see the towers there. The place is really isolated. You must drive about 45 miles through some canyons and desert to get there. The road is small but paved. A lady there was glad it was so remote. She said, “it keeps out the riffraff.” I spent August 24 at Mesa Verde National Park. Went the Cliff Palace, Long House, Balcony House and saw many others from the road and off a little tram that you can ride through part of the park. What a place! Really a lot of ruins there and in such good shape. There was a Hopi man at two of the ruins who was there from California to go back to his roots. He gave tobacco offerings and sang a chant to bring back the ancestor’s spirits at one of the great Kivas. Tears were streaming down his cheeks and mine. Really a touching experience!

I next went to Durango on August 25 to stay for seven days before going back to Pagosa Springs for the Labor Day weekend. I rode on the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad one day, went dancing at the Bogies Club on Friday night in the Iron Horse Inn which was just down the road from the campsite. Had a really good time!

Got back to Pagosa Springs on Wednesday, September,1. They had assigned me a place by the river like I had requested. Really nice! I spent the day setting up. Next day had another massage at the 160 Salon. Very relaxing!

In a couple of weeks there was going to be a Folk Festival in Pagosa Springs. I knew that Susan was going to be in Gallup for her class that weekend, so I invited her to come to the festival with me. I was staying in a RV park outside of town. She said she would meet me, but she would get a room in a motel there. She found a room in a motel not far from the RV park.

On Friday afternoon, August, 3 Susan came in from her workshop in Gallup. Was I ever glad to see her! She really seemed glad to see me as well. She checked into a motel down the road and then we went to eat Bar BQ up the road. We went downtown to the hot springs and walked along the path by the river. We came back to the RV and made a fire. Stars were out and it was really romantic!

On Saturday morning, August 4 she came over and we went to the Four Corners Folk Festival on Reservoir Hill. There were seven bands that day. We enjoyed the music. We sat on the hill for a while then went walking up to the top to see down in the valley and toward the San Juan Mountains. It was a beautiful day without a cloud in the sky. After the festival we went back to the RV park and enjoyed the stars as we had the night before.

On Sunday we decided not to go to the festival again. Susan met me about 10:30 a.m. and we went to breakfast at a little quaint restaurant outside of town on the Durango highway. After that we went to see Chimney Rock Ruins on the 1:00 tour. We had the same tour guide as when I was there before. He took us on a two-hour tour of the pueblo ruins and it was as interesting as the first time. After the tour we drove into town and ate at the little Mexican Restaurant above the river by the hot springs.

After eating we drove the other way out of town to Wolf Creek Pass. Stopped at the waterfall along the way. Got up to the top of the pass and found a little dirt road going up to the mountain. Took it up in the forest until it turned into a very small road on the side of the mountain. Watched the sunset over the mountains at a turnoff that had been used by campers. By then it was dark, so we came down the mountain and went back to the RV park to watch the stars.

The next morning, August 6, Susan met me and we drove to Chama. We walked around the town looking at the shops and the railroad station. We had lunch at the old hotel across from the railroad station then she left for Santa Fe and I went to Taos. I got to Taos in the afternoon after driving on a beautiful high road through the mountains. The road went over several high passes and was almost deserted all the way. I found an RV park in town and stayed there until morning.

The next day I got up and went to the Taos pueblo. I enjoyed looking around in the pueblo and talking with some of the residents. Drove into town and had lunch at a Mexican restaurant on the old plaza. Then went to the Kit Carson Museum. Walked by a toy store on the way and came back to buy Lafonda, the little Crow girl from Montana a stuffed lamb that I mailed back to her. I also saw two toy dogs, a Rottweiler and a Greyhound. I bought both of them as well. I named the Rottweiler, Charlie and he rode with me on my travels just like John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charlie.’’ The difference being that Charlie in the story was a standard poodle. The sleeping Greyhound I gave to Susan when she came over to show me the way to her house from the RV park that evening. She named her "Puppy."

Chapter 23 - First Days in Santa Fe, NM

I found the Santa Fe Skies RV Park when I reached Santa Fe on August 8. The park is in a beautiful setting on the top of a ridge on the Cerrillos Road close to Interstate 25. From the top of the ridge, you can see the Sangre De Cristo Mountains with Santa Fe at their base, the Jemez Mountains where the sun sets, the Ortiz Mountains where the little towns of Cerrillos and Madrid are nestled, and the Sandia Mountains in the distance with Albuquerque beneath. The park is owned by the Brown family whose grandfather acquired the property by “homesteading.”

Susan came to the RV park and I followed her to her apartment. Unbelievable! She lived in a residential area where all of the houses sit on large acreage. Her apartment had a balcony from which you can see all of the mountains around Santa Fe. The sunset from there is absolutely breathtaking! Her apartment is really fixed up cute and she calls it her “nest.” We listened to some music, ate some bread and fruit for supper and just enjoyed being together in such a beautiful setting.

At this point I ended my travels for 1999 except for making side trips out of Santa Fe from time to time. I found the perfect setting and planned stay around. Why would I want to leave!

Susan and I spent a lot of time together. The weather was getting colder and many nights I would not stay in my RV but would stay at her apartment which was much cozier. In February 2000 we decided to live together. We looked for a place to live in Santa Fe that we both liked and found a house to rent in Eldorado at Santa Fe at 2 Cerrado Road. It was a good place to live, but we wanted to buy our own place in Eldorado. On September 25, 2001, we found the house at 7 Cuesta Road that suited our needs.

We went to the Albuquerque Baloon Fiesta in 1999.

Chapter 24 - Living in Eldorado

7 Cuesta Road, Eldorado at Santa Fe

In the meantime, Susan and I had gotten married on November 9, 2000. I wanted to get married in 2000 so that I could always remember how many years we had been married just by knowing what year it was. We were married in the Santa Fe County Administration Building in a “dike” judge’s chamber with two clerks as our witnesses. Immediately after the short service we drove to Albuquerque, got on a plane and eventually flew to Jackson Hole, Wyoming in the Tetons, rented a car and drove to Slide Lake where we had rented a cabin for the week. The second morning we were there the lake froze solid! It was really cold there but being newly-weds the weather didn’t bother us a bit!

I almost made bad property purchases twice. The first was to purchase Chuje’s Saloon in Engle, Texas. Engle is a little Czech settlement between Schulenburg and Flatonia. The saloon had served the surrounding farming community providing a place for locals to play pool, drink beer and listen to the jute box. Several of us from Houston would go there from time to time and see Mr. and Mrs. Chuje and enjoy just being out of town. On one occasion several of us celebrated the 100^th Anniversary of the saloon by showing up with a cake for the Chujes. The saloon was closed for good when Mr. Chuje died and Mrs. Chuje could no longer run it. After a while she moved to a nursing home in Schulenburg. I would visit her from time to time taking her kolaches which she really loved. A few years after the Chuje’s had both passed away I contacted one of their children who lived in New Ulm and offered to buy the saloon. My plan was to fix it up and to operate it with my two friends, Doug Monaghen and Tom Draper. We would each take turns running it during the year. Tom checked out the property values around there and I decided on a fair price for the saloon and their house adjacent to it. There were four or five children in the family and none of them wanted to sell. One of them who lived in New Ulm even said he wanted to fix it up himself. As far as I know no one ever opened it again!

The second time was to purchase some property in Dixon, New Mexico. Susan and I had been going to Dixon to visit our physician farmer friends, Adam and Steve, a gentlemen couple as they called themselves. We found out that there was a small farm for sale there and we went to see it. There was a house, a yurt, and another small building on the property. There was an acequia above the property with some land below with a small field and some fruit trees. We asked Adam to go with us the second time to evaluate the house and property and to give us an idea of its a fair market value. He did and we gave the owners an offer based on Adam’s assessment. The owners turned it down since it was under their asking price. (The market values were high at the time and six months later there was an economic recession and everything got much cheaper. The owners called us to see if we would still give them our offer price and we said that we were no longer interested.) As it turned out we brought Charlie, Susan’s dad to Santa Fe from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida after his wife, Mollie died. Charlie lived in Santa Fe for ten more years in the Ponce de Leon Senior Living Facility. Good thing both of the property deals fell through!

Chapter 25 - My Breaks in Life

Sometimes you just happen to be at the right place at the right time. I have had that happen in my life on several occasions. Health is one. I had an emergency appendectomy when I was about nine years old; I have had all the vaccinations available at the time for all the dreaded diseases that have killed or crippled so many people throughout the ages; I started wearing glasses for nearsightedness in the second grade; all of my teeth have been replaced either with bridges, caps or implants; I have had cataract surgery in both eyes and I take pills daily for both high cholesterol and low thyroid. I hear cicadas in both ears when I am awake and from time to time I have visual migraines (that are not painful, just irritating). In ages past I would be a different person if I had lived this long- blind, no teeth or a debilitating disease?

Other breaks occurred to alter my life’s path in academics. In junior high school I took Latin from Ms. McGinny. I wasn’t passing and she said if I wouldn’t tell anyone I ever took her class she would pass me out of junior high to high school. Ms. Sauer, my high school English teacher also told me that I didn’t pass her final exam in the 12^th grade and I couldn’t graduate without it. She let me come back to her classroom and retake the test at during my P.E. period. I returned and retook the test. She gave me a passing grade allowing me to graduate (I don’t think she ever graded it!). Another time when I was defending my doctoral dissertation one of my committee members, Dr. Andrew (“Skip”) Szilagy from the Business Management department questioned my answers concerning an ANOVA statistical analysis. At that point my dissertation chairman, Dr. Stewart North, abruptly stopped the procedure and asked me to leave the room. When I returned, he welcomed me as Dr. Bower. I later found out that he told Dr. Szilagy that he had several months to question me about any specific concerns and now was not the time to question it at the end of my defense. Any one of these academic breaks would have changed the outcome of my future!

I have always been involved in academics. I attended six years of elementary school, three years of junior high, three years of high school, five years for a B.S. degree, two years for an M.Ed. degree and five out of seven years for an Ed.D. That is 24 years in all!

My mom, Clara Mae died in Santa Fe on December 19, 2003. She lived in Houston in another apartment in Houston after my dad died. She lived there until 2000 when we asked her to come to Santa Fe. She did. She lived in three retirement homes in Santa Fe until her death on December 19, 2003. She loved being in Santa Fe, especially the snowy winters, but she always had to use extra oxygen since she suffered from emphysema and Santa Fe is about 7,000 ft. above sea level. The day she died was Susan’s last scheduled day at work at Neighborhood Housing of Santa Fe (later Homewise). She died in my arms in her bed. I was lucky to be at the death of both my father and mother!

Chapter 26 - Retirement in Santa Fe

When you are retired you must find activities that are worthwhile. Volunteering is one way to fill your time. Since I have lived in Santa Fe I have volunteered at the following:

* Bienvenidos Outreach - Susan and I made sandwiches and gave them out at a local park on Cerrillos Rd. for the homeless every weekend

* Selling veggies at the Santa Fe Farmer’s market- Susan and I went to the market every Saturday morning during growing seasons to help our gentlemen farmer friends Adam and Steve sell the produce they grew on their farm in Dixon

* Beneficial Farms- I helped to fill grocery bags for the participants in the weekly fresh produce program

* Kitchen Angels- I helped out in the kitchen to prepare food to be taken to homebound folks in the program

* Santa Fe Botanical Garden - we both served as docents at the garden on a weekly basis and gave monthly walks in the summer about “What’s blooming in the garden?”

* Pecos National Historical Park - we helped in the Visitor Center and gave monthly plant walks during the summer to identify the flowering plants on the trail around the church and the ruins

* New Mexico History Museum - I took a seven-month course and became a docent at the museum. I gave weekly tours until Covid prevented the tours for a couple of years- 2020-2022.

I also learned how to use a web design program, Dreamweaver CS5.5. Susan and I had created gardens around our house in response to our love of plants and gardens. I named ours, Eldorado Windy Farm. It wasn’t actually a farm, but it made for a catchy name for where we lived. In response to our endeavors I created a website, ”Eldorado Windy Farm-Home Gardening and Other Interesting Places and Events”. It became a location where I not only recorded details about the plants around the house, but also other of my endeavors: a personal blog, the home garden, the Santa Fe Botanical Garden at Museum Hill, Pecos National Historical Park Flowering Plant Project, a History of New Mexico with Timelines, the Legal Tender Saloon, Bistro and Music Hall-Lamy New Mexico, A Multicultural History of Smithville Texas, the Matagorda Maddens of the Texas Gulf Coast.

Highlights of 1999

October

I began volunteering at Kitchen Angels on the 20th for three days a week. Other activities involved trips to:

-Madrid, Cerrillos and Tattoo Tammy's Tiny Town ,Albuquerque to the Balloon Fiesta , Jemez ntains and Valle Grande

-Houston via Continental Airlines (snowed in Santa Fe on 17th)

-Ghost train ride to Lamy on Halloween

November

-Began making sandwiches for Bienvenedos Outreach on Sundays for the homeless

-Made a vow to stay together with Susan over the Pecos Pueblo Sipapu

-Trip to the Gila Wilderness with Susan over the Thanksgiving Holidays in the RV

December

-RV Trip to Houston before Christmas

-stopped in Boerne to see Doug, Laurien and Kirkland

-Smithville

-San Antonio with Mimi for Christmas lights on the Riverwalk, Austin to see Todd Christmas brunch at Four Seasons Hotel

Highlights of 2000

January

Spent New Year's Eve in the Twilight Suite on the top floor of the Heart Seed Bed &

Breakfast (Y2K-everyone thought all the computers would crash because of the old dating system beginning with 19--)

-Galisteo and Pecos Pueblo ruins (renewed vows over the sipapu); where we had decided if we ever got married, we would in the kiva at Pecos National Historical Park

-Went to Abiquiu with Susan and stayed at the Abiquiu Inn

-Ghost Ranch, Echo Amphitheater, Christ of the Desert Monastery


Echo Ampitheater	Christ in the Desert Monastery

-Chaco Culture National Historic Park with Susan over the MLK weekend (stayed in the RV)

-Began Navajo Studies course (4 Tuesday nights) at the SF Community College

February

Susan and I decided to live together and rented a house in the Eldorado (2 Cerrado Rd.) on the 28th. She moved out of her apartment and I stored my RV down the street at the Eldorado Storage. The weekend of Feb. 11, I met her in Taos. She was doing a presentation there and met me at the Cottonwood Inn B&B in the evening after she had finished. We celebrated my birthday there and on Sunday took a ride into the mountains and to the Rio Grande gorge. On Monday the 14th, Valentine's Day, I gave her a note that I had written her asking her if she would marry me sometime when she felt the time was right. She said yes and we decided to set the date sometime in the fall. We decided to work out the details at a later date. (We ate at the Old Blinking Light after driving there in a bad snowstorm I had never been in a snowstorm before. I had a terrible sinus virus infection that I had just gotten driving to Taos.)

-18th - 22nd Todd visited

2 Cerrado Road, Eldorado

March

- 4 - Mardi Gras Party - Mine Shaft Tavern in Madrid

- 7-12 - Farmington, Mesa Verde, Gallup

- 30 - Flew to Houston to pick up Mimi to bring her to Santa Fe to see if she liked it; went to Kingston on April 3; drove Mimi back to Houston on April 5-6; flew back to Albuquerque on April 8

- 13 - Taos/w Susan

May

6- Susan's Vacation (Santa Fe - Ft. Stockton; Ft. Stockton -Fredericksburg; Fredericksburg - Austin (San Antonio visit); Austin - Houston;

Houston - Eunice (Fred's Lounge in Mamou); Eunice - Lafayette; to New Orleans; New Orleans to White Oak, TX (Randy & Pam); White Oak to Palo Duro Canyon, Amarillo; Amarillo to Santa Fe

-26-29 Margaret's visit (Taos, Embudo Station, Blues Concert in Madrid)

June

- 5 Flew to Houston to move Mimi to Santa Fe; drove to Ft. Stockton June 9; arrived in Santa Fe on June 9

- 10 - Mimi moved into the Kingston Retirement Community

- 19-21 Doug and Kirkland's visit (Acoma, Bandelier/gave Kirkland his Medicine stick in kiva)

June 22 - Las Vegas w/John Brown to see the Castle renovation at Montezuma

June 24-25 - Archeology on horseback trip out of Ojo Caliente Mineral Springs to see two pueblo ruins

July 6 - Taos/w Susan

July 10-15 Gallup, Farmington (Zuni)

July 16 - San Juan Arts and Crafts (Northern Tribes)

Aug 3-6 Pine Key, Florida for Susan’s Uncle Sol's memorial service


Sol's ashes in the ocean	Susan's cousins, Ken and Charlie	Susan and Charlie

Aug10 Taos (Red River, Eagle Nest, Cimmaron) w/Susan & Mimi, Embudo Station

Sept.1-4 Four Corners Folk Festival, Pagosa Springs; Lake City; Chama

Sept.12 Farmington, Ouray, Silverton, Durango, Gallup

Sept. 29 He-She Review, Madrid

Nov. 9 Susan and I were married in Santa Fe

Nov. 9-13 Jackson Hole, Wyoming

Dec.1-2 - Taos

Dec.9 - Carlsbad

Dec.15 - Taos

Highlights of 2001

Jan. 6 - King's Day Indian Dances at Cochiti & Santo Domingo Pueblos

Jan. 11-14 Doug, Laurien & Kirkland to Santa Fe

Jan. 26-29 Amy to Santa Fe

Feb. 2- Taos, Mountain Home Lodge, CO (Chama Pass)

Feb. 11 Cochiti Lake RV Park (Susan in Atlanta)

Feb. 15-19 Margaret's Visit

March 11-14 Tom and Joanie's Visit (they stayed in my RV at Santa Fe Skies)


Lamy train	Rafting on Rio Grande

March 16-19 Raton, Eagles Nest, Red River

March 31-April 1 RV trip to Manzano mountains, Mountainair

April 13-15 RV trip to Jemez Mtns

May 11-19 Ft. Lauderdale/Orlando

May 28 Todd's Visit

May 29 Carter's Visit

June 9-11 Susan in Espanola, RV to Ojo Caliente Hot Springs

June 22-25, Clayton, Raton, Red River

July 2-12 Tom & Joanie Visit

July 21 Galisteo Rodeo

July 22 Eight Northern Pueblo Arts and Crafts Show at Nambe Falls

July 27-30 Margaret's Visit (Embudo Station)

Aug.10-13 Marcy's Visit

Aug. 19-23, Ken/Doug/Kirkland to Utah/Arizona

Sept. 3 Pagosa Springs Four Corners Folk Festival

Sept. 14-16 Raton, Valle Vidal, Red River

Sept. 27 Moved into house at 7 Cuesta Rd.

Nov. 10-12 RV to Gallup, Chama

Nov. 20-30 Todd's Trip (on 28th moved Mimi to El Castillo)

Dec.10 - Ron Torre died (owner of Cerrado Rd house)

Dec. 28- Performed Michelle & George’s wedding

Dec. 29 -Tom Draper in town

Highlights of 2002

-Jan. 23-30, Neville's Visit

-Jan. 31-Feb. 5 Layfette, Opelousas, New Orleans

-Feb. 22-25 Raton, La Veta, CO

-March 9-11, Phoenix (visit Marcy and family)

-March 16, t. Saint Patrick’s Day train to Lamy

-July 3-8 Margaret's visit

-August 30-Sept.3 Pagosa Springs Four Corners Folk Festival

-Sept. 14, NM State Fair, Albuquerque

-Oct. 11-18 Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, Russian River, Modesto (met Charlie & Mollie there)

-November 9, Abiquiu Inn

-Nov. 11-13, Gary and Anna's Visit

-Nov. 16, RV trip to El Paso via Bosque de Apache to visit with Doug

-Nov. 27-Dec. 1, Todd's Visit

-New Year’s Eve- Sagebrush Inn, Taos

Highlights of 2003

-Jan. 16-23 Jerry Byrd's Visit

-Jan. 31-Feb.4 Ft. Davis, Mc Donald Observatory for a Star Party, Ruidoso

-April 1 Fort Union

-April 18-22 Visit Monaghen's in Boerne

-April 25 Volcanic Pulse of Northern NM field trip

-May 30-June 3 Raton, Leadville, Aspen

-June 6-11 Amy's Visit

-July 6-16 Todd's Visit

-July 28-31 Suzie's Visit

-August 15-20, San Francisco (Margaret & Roosevelt Lue), Russian River, Modesto

-August 30 Hungry Ear Festival at Eaves Ranch

-September 12-15 Magnolia Lacy's visit

-September 20-22, Chama (Cumbres & Toltec RR)

-Oct. 3-5 Taos, Mountain Home Lodge (Cumbres Pass)

-Oct. 10-22, Charlie's Visit (Abiquiu, Taos, Las Vegas, Madrid, Cochiti Lake, Los Alamos, Valle Grande)

-Nov. 8-9, Taos - Comfort Suites (3rd Anniversary)

-Dec. 2 - Doug to Albuquerque for a workshop, went to Madrid

-Dec. 19 - Mimi died at the Rosemont after a long illness of COPD; Susan retired from Neighborhood Housing

-Dec. 22-27 - Todd and Rachel came to Santa Fe for Christmas, went to Bandelier & Los Alamos

-Dec. 31- Went to Madrid's Java Junction B&B, but room smelled like gas, so we left

Highlights of 2004

-Jan. 13-28 Took Mimi's ashes to Houston for burial at the National Cemetery. Ceremony on Jan. 16, then to Kemah (NASA), Galveston to Moody Gardens & Strand-stayed at the San Louis Hotel, out to eat w/ Fran & Bob, Carolyn, Lynda, Anne, and Bill Borello & Darlene, went to Schulenburg & Shiner w/ Jerry Byrd, left Houston for East Texas and the Alabama-Coushatta Reservation and Hodges Gardens in La., Lafayette (Acadian Village), Mamou, Eunice- ate in Rayne, Henderson (Whisky Landing), stayed in New Orleans at the

Monteleone Hotel in the French Quarter.

-Feb. 6 - Red River

-Mar. 16-22 - Cliff & Annie’s visit, Madrid, Cerrillos, Bandelier & Los Alamos, Pecos, Abiquiu

-Mar. 27 - Glorietta Battlefield cleanup

-April. 2-9 - Ft. Lauderdale to see Charlie, Pine Key to see Cliff & Annie

-April. 18-21- Bosque de Apache to see the birds in the RV

-May 20-29 - went to Mass. to Andrew's graduation from Hampshire College in Amherst, drove through Vermont, New Hampshire, and western Mass.

-June 9-28 - Moved Charlie to Ponce de Leon in Santa Fe, drove back car on I-10 from 24-29 through a rainstorm from Mobile, Al. to west Texas; saw Doug & family on the 27th.

-July 4 - Pancakes on the Plaza and saw the fireworks at the RV park w/ Susan and Charlie.

-July 14 - Second eye surgery on left lens

-July 18 - Galisteo Rodeo with Susan and Charlie

-July 31-Aug. 1 - Laguna, Acoma, Gallup, Mesa Verde

-July 8 - Greek Festival w/Susan and Charlie

-July 13-15 - Raton, La Veta, CO

-Aug. 3-6 - Went to Pagosa Springs (Folk Festival rained out), Chimney Rock Ruins, Lake Williams

-Sept. 10-12 - Taos Big Barn Dance w/Michael Hearne, Picaris Pueblo Fair

-Sept. 18 - High Road to Taos Art Tour w/Fran & Bob

-Sept. 22-27 - Went to Houston to officiate at Todd and Rachel's wedding on the 25th

-Sept. 30-Oct. 10 - Gary and Anna to Santa Fe (Cochiti Lake), went with them to Pecos Pueblo, Bandelier and Los Alamos Bradbury Museum

Gary Evers and Anna at Pecos Pueblo

-Oct. 21-26 Margaret visiting

-Oct. 30- Susan to Laguna

-Dec. 5-8- Doug & Kirkland to ABQ/Santa Fe

-Dec. 23-28-Todd & Rachel to Santa Fe

-Dec. 31-Old Blinking Light for New Year's Eve/ eat at Doc Martin's

Highlights of 2005

-Jan 15- Jan's Retirement Party in Raton

-Jan 20-26 Louisiana - Lafayette (Randol’s)(Eunice, Abbeville (Shucks), Mamou (Fred's Lounge), Ville Platte (Cajun Festival), Henderson (Whiskey Landing), New Orleans (Commander's Palace)

-Feb. 26- Susan's Laguna Workshop

-March- House stuccoed by Tesuque Stucco

-April 20-26 - Took RV to Fiddler's Frolic in Hallettsville, TX.

-April 30-May 2- Pike Reunion near Mason, TX (went to see Doug and Laurien on way home)

-June 7-18 Alaska Boat Tour (Juneau-Ketchikan)

-July 9- Susan's Laguna Workshop

-July 10- Folk Art Festival

-July 20-25- Kirkland's visit

-July 30- Susan's Tai Chi get together at house

-August 13- Susan's Laguna Workshop

-August 21-23 Went to Chama in RV to meet Bill & Darlene to ride the train

-Sept. 8-11- Michael Hearne's Big Barn Dance in Taos

-Sept. 20-28 - Neville's Visit

-Sept. 24- Greek Festival

-Oct. 5-10- Mimbres Workshop in Silver City (present from Marcy & Jimmy)

-Oct. 20-23- RV trip to Bandelier

-Nov. 11-16- Casas Grande, Mata Ortiz trip to Mexico

-Dec. 22-27- Todd & Rachel for Christmas

-Dec. 31- Old Blinking Light Dinner & Dance to SXSW

Highlights of 2006

-Jan. 19-24- Margaret's visit

-Feb. 4-8 - Marcy's visit

-Feb. 17-21 Go to Austin to look for house for Todd & Rachel

-March 5- Tent Rocks Workshop w/Kirt Kempter

-March 17-22 - Close on house in Austin

-April 1-17- Trip to Japan

-June 15-19- Danny & Millie's Visit

Hiking on Aspen Vista trail

-July 16-21 - Colorado Trip w/Charlie (Salida, Gunnison, Ouray, Durango, Pagosa Springs)

-July 29- Abiquiu Summer Lavender Farm Festival (w/Carole)

-Aug 30 - Sept. 4 - RV to Pagosa Springs (Four Corner's Folk Festival)

-Sept. 15-23 - Neville's Visit

-Oct. 8 - Abiquiu Art Festival w/Kimberly

-Oct. 12-23 - (20th) Austin HS 35th Reunion (Houston Hobby airport, Fayetteville, Smithville (saw Robert), Austin, Georgetown Market Days, Boerne, San Antonio, Schulenberg, Houston, Kemah w/Amy & Ricardo)

-Nov. 10-11- Celebrate 6th Anniversary at Ranchos de San Juan

-Dec. 9 - Performed Anne Martin's wedding at Bishop's Lodge Chapel

-Dec. 22 -Jan 1- Went to Berkeley w/ Charlie to celebrate Christmas w/Marcy & family, left Oakland Thurs. Dec. 29, plane returned to Oakland from Las Vegas, NV because of snowstorm; Oakland on 30th, Oakland to El Paso, TX on 31st; rented a car at the airport and drove back to Santa Fe on Jan. 1. (2 1/2 ft of snow)

Highlights of 2007

Jan.- Took first Chinese Language class at SF Community College

Jan. 26-7- Blinking Light, Taos (Charlie's heart attack)

Feb. 25- Geology of Santa Fe Workshop w/Kirt Kempner

March 12-15 - Went to Guadalupe National Park, meet Doug & family, hike up Guadalupe Peak, tallest peak in Texas on the 14th

March 31- Mesa Prieta Petroglyph tour

April 22- Abiquiu's Copper Canyon Hike w/Kirt Kempter

April 29- Chili & Sherds at San Cristobal Pueblo

May 4-7 Marcy's visit

May 23-June 17 - Greece Tour

July 14- International Folk Festival (meet Eddie Owens & Dru)

Aug. 5-12 RV trip to Chama, Pagosa Springs, & Creede (met Terri & Howard)

Aug. 24- Huevos Rancheros Class in Embudo with Margaret & Ermamita

Sept. 4-10 Stefan & Rupel’s Wedding in Chicago w/ Charlie

Sept. 23- High Road to Taos Art Tour w/Charlene & friends, Terri & Howard

Sept. 24- Gary & Anna to house w/Terri & Howard

Oct 6- Abiquiu Art Tour w/Eddie Owens & Dru

Oct.14- Abiquiu w/Don & Eleanor

Oct.18-24 Margaret's visit, 20th to Micaceous Clay Cooking Class in Embudo, to Taos drove the Enchanted Circle

Dec. 22-28- Todd & Rachel's visit

Dec. 30-Jan1- Taos, Old Blinking for supper & dancing w/ SXSW

Highlights of 2008

Jan.- Began 2nd Chinese Language class at SF Community College

Feb. 13-26 TX/LA trip (fly to San Antonio, Boerne, Austin, Houston (to see Amy, Jerry, Tom & Joanie, high school friends/ dancing at Rodeo Nights), Lafayette (Randol’s', see Sandy Sandoz, Abbeville-Shucks, Eunice-DI's & Hwy 90 Club, Mamou-Fred's Lounge, Breaux Bridge- Mulatte's, St. Martinsville, Henderson- Whiskey Landing/ Pat Huval's, New Orleans-Cafe Du Monde, Felix's)


Whiskey Landing - Atchafala River	Tante Sue - Fred's Lounge, Mamou	Me and Sandy Sandoz (Pike Bro.) - Layfeyette

July 18- Heldsburg, CA with Jim, Marcy, Susan and Drew to visit Sanoma wineries

March 14- put in Purchase Agreement on Dixon property, house, yurt, shop, horno for $345,000- never bought

Highlights of 2009

Feb. 11-16 Lafayette, La (Breaux Bridge, Whiskey Landing, Abbeville)

April 2-14 Went to China via Los Angeles (Getty Museum, Tar Pits, Farmer's Market, Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou)

June 27- Sept. 19 Helped Adam and Steve at the SF Farmer's Market

June 14- Jemez hike with Kirt Kempter

July 1-5 - Kirkland Monagnen visited

July 28 - Drew (Susan’s nephew) came to visit

July 30 - Aug. 3 Marcy, Jim, Andrew ,Susan, Charlie & I went to Creede (Antlers)

Aug. 12-15 - Todd and Rachel visited

Sept. 10 - 13 Margaret visited. Went to Taos to Michael Hearne's Big Barn Dance

Sept. 21 Went to Flagstaff, Sedona, Grand Canyon, Hopi, Gallup

Oct. 11 Chinese dinner with Chuaun Bin and neighbors (made noodles)

Oct. 1-5 Canyonlands & Arches with SW Seminars (Kirt Kempter)

Highlights of 2010

Jan. 8 - Flew to San Francisco for a party for Jim's dad in Modesto

Feb. 12- Went to Fredericksburg, TX to check out the facilities for Charlie's Navy Days Celebration later in the spring.

March 6 - Doug came to SF for a visit ; went to Mineshaft Tavern in Madrid

April 10- Brought home my first hive for beekeeping

April 18- Dixon Seed Exchange

April 22- Got my first bees from Ecoversity

May 1- Charlie's Navy Days Celebration in Fredericksburg, TX at the Museum of the Pacific War.

May 29- El Malpais Tour with SW Seminars

June 24- July 2- Went with Todd and Rachel on an RV trip to Colorado (Creede, Pagosa Springs)

July 31- Oct 9 Helped Adam and Steve at the SF Farmer's Market


Steve and Adam selling veggies at the SF Farmer's Market	The Dixon (Apadaca) Farm

August 24- Got wild hive from Eldorado resident

Sept. 10-12- Michael Hearne's Big Barn Dance in Taos with Margaret


Michael Hearne	The Rifters	Margaret

Oct. 15- Micaeous pot firing at Felipe's studio in La Madera

Oct. 16- Galisteo Art Tour w/ Don & Eleanor

Oct. 29-Nov. 8 Black Pot Festival - Layfeyette, LA

Dec. 18- Holiday Italian Party

Highlights of 2011

Feb. 7 - Susan's brain hemorrhage while she was at drumming class

Nov. 18 - Charlie died

Dec. 21- 28 - Went to San Antonio; met Todd, Rachel & her parents over Christmas (Doug & family met us for supper one night)

This was the year I began to put together a website, Eldorado Windy Farm. I had been interested in learning how to design a website, so with lots of time at home being with Susan as she recovered from her brain hemorrage, I learned how to design a website, etc. I bought the Dreamweaver CS5.5 program to design it and found a server (iPage) to post it on the Internet. It went through many revisions as I brought together several of the projects that I had worked on in the past. The sections were: Ken's Personal Blog, The Home Garden, The Santa Fe Botanical Garden at Museum Hill, Pecos National Historical Park Flowering Plant Project (2017), A History of New Mexico with Timelines, The Legal Tender Saloon, Lamy, New Mexico, A Multicultural History of Smithville, Texas, and The Matagorda Maddens of the Texas Gulf Coast. Our neighbor, Mike Jackson who is a graphic artist even designed a logo for me showing lavender, bees, mountains, sun, and wind!

Eldorado Windy Farm

Highlights of 2012

Jan. 18-26 - Went to San Francisco

Feb. 11 - Taos, danced to the Rifters at the Sagebrush Inn (first time dancing since Susan’s brain hemorrhage)

April 21-24 – Went to Chicago to visit Stef (Susan’s nephew) & Rupal

May 26 – Participated in the Eldorado Garden Tour

June 14 –18 – Went to Telluride, CO

August 20-22 – Went to Ojo Caliente while Susan visited Marcy in Berkeley stayed in old hotel

September 5-8 - Went to Creede with Kirt and SW Seminars

Oct.12 & 13 - Went to the Balloon Fiesta – met Doug and Laurien

November 22–26 –Texas trip- San Antonio (River Walk), Fredericksburg & Austin

December 31- New Year’s Eve at the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas, NM. Danced to the Rifters

Susan and I volunteered at the Santa Fe Farmer's Market every Saturday morning with our gentlemen couple farmer friends from Dixon, Steve and

Adam.

I also sold lavender products from my garden at the Eldorado Farmer's Market.

Highlights of 2013

Feb.10 - Korean dinner at Izmi Sushi (owners are Korean not Japanese)

April 13–17 – San Francisco to see Becks

April 1- May 6 – Tour of Taiwan (Taipei, Taichung, Kaohsiung, Sun Moon Lake, Hualien, Karoku Gorge)

August 10-16 – Creede Colorado w/Todd and Rachel

August 29-September 4 - Texas (Close on Round Rock house sale); Austin, Fredericksburg, San Marcos

September 9-14 – Margaret visit

September 15- Mike & Dan’s wedding

December 8-16 – Go to San Antonio, Port Lavaca, Port O’Connor, Rockport & Westin w/ Todd & Rachel (visiting cousins re: Uncle Willie)

December 30-31 – Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas, NM for Rifters

Highlights of 2014

January 11& 25 – Training for Santa Fe Botanical Garden

January 29 - 1^st Docent at SFBG

February 1 – Lunar New Year Party w/Adam & Steve at farm

February 14-17 - Visit John & Becky Phillips in Carlsbad (Madden cousins)

March 2 - Botanical Garden Volunteer Appreciation Party at Hilton

March 23 – October 26- Docent at SFBG every Sunday afternoon

May 19 - Jury Duty (not chosen)

June 7–15 - Marcy & Jimmy to Santa Fe

June 14 – Presented “Honeybees and Native Pollinators” @Whole Foods Community Room

July 11-18 – Creede, CO; met Doug & Laurien

August 17 – Apprentice night at the SF Opera w/Talon de Gato staff

September 4-7 - Michael Hearne’s Barn Dance at Taos Ski Valley w/Margaret (Margaret stayed in SF until the 9^th)

September 11-18- Lake Tahoe w/Susan’s cousins

November 8- High Tea at Talon de Gato farm w/Adam & Steve

November 26-30 - Ft. Davis for Thanksgiving w/Todd, Rachel & their friends

December 10- Geology of La Cienega w/Kirt Kempter

Dec 20- worked at Glow for SFBG

Highlights of 2015

January 21-31 - Russian River for Venetian masked costume party; San Francisco w/Marcy & Jimmy

March 28- Attended the Bug lecture at Rodeo Grounds

March 29- Presented SFBG information to SF Iris Society

April 6- Began docent in SFBG on Monday mornings

April 11- Presented “Beekeeping in Eldorado” at Anna’s Home & Garden Center

April 15-24 – Madden Reunion in Rockport; then to San Antonio (Fiesta)

June - Suzie and Anderson's visit before returning to Hawaii

Highlights of 2016

February 16 – March 4 – Hawaii Big Island Trip - Kona, Volcano Village, Honolulu w/Marcy & Jim Beck

March 21 – April 25 - Monday Santa Fe Botanical Garden Docent Training

May 21 – Rachel’s Ph.D. Graduation Party in Austin

June 11 – Suzie & Anderson visit on way from Honolulu to Houston (Anderson’s BD on 12^th)

July 14 – 21– Rocky Mt. Park, Denver w/Todd & Rachel

September 11–17 - Trip to south NM w/Margaret

October 22 - Opening of Ojos y Manos at SFBG

December 21 – January 5 – Russian River, San Francisco (Christmas w/Becks)

Highlights of 2017

January 26 – 29 - Music Festival in Red River (-17 degrees F)

Don Richmond and Michael Hearne

March 27 – November 27 – Blooming plant study once/month walk at Pecos Nat’l Historical Park

July 25 – 30 – Antlers in Creede, Repertory Theater & drove to Lake City

August 7 – 10 – “Real Man Tour” w/Doug & Jim Anderson – SF, Ojo Caliente, Taos, & ABQ Tamaya Resort

October 6 – 22 – Italy Walking Tour - Florence, Siena, Penza, Rome

December 14 – 20 – Las Vegas, NV to visit Todd & Rachel

Highlights of 2018

2018 was a year of volunteering. I volunteered at the Visitor Center desk at Pecos National Historical Park on Mondays and the Santa Fe Botanical Garden on Fridays. Susan and I also volunteered at the Visitor Center Information booth on the plaza once a week as well.

Feb 27-March 1- Ojo Caliente w/Susan

May 24-29 - drove to Flagstaff to meet Todd and Rachel

Susan and I did summer monthly “What’s Blooming in the Garden” tours at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden

July 17-22 – went to Creede, CO. Stayed at Antlers on the Rio Grande. Went to 3 plays at the Repertory Theater and drove to Lake City.

July 14- International Folk Art Market

July 28- Spanish Market

Aug. 18 - Indian Market

Sept. 22 - High Road to Taos Art Tour

October 6- Abiquiu Art Tour

October 13 – Galisteo Art Tour w/Don & Eleanor McMillian

October 24 – Nov. 1- fly to New Orleans, meet Marcy & Jim, drove to Lafayette. Stayed at the Mouton Plantation. Black Pot Festival. Visit south Louisiana towns, etc. Drive back to NO for three days.

December 20-26 – flew to Phoenix, rent a car, drive to Tucson to be with Todd & Rachel.

Highlights of 2019

January 19-20 – Taos – El Pueblo

April 2-9 - San Diego – Susan’s cousin’s reunion

June 23-26 – Suzie and Anderson’s visit

July 13 – Purple Adobe Lavender Farm Fair

July 16-21 – Creede, CO; Antler’s w/Doug & Laurien

July 27 – Spanish Market

Summer- sold lavender products at the Eldorado Farmers Market on Fridays

August 22-24 – Cimmaron - St. James Hotel/Rifters; Taos- stayed at Casa Bienvenidos

September 17-26 – Hawaii O'ahu Trip, Oakland; Honolulu

October 5 - El Rito Art Tour

October 12 - Abiquiu Art Tour

October 13 - Galisteo Art Tour w/Don and Eleanor- lunch in Cerrillos at the Blackkbird Cafe

Lunch in Cerrillos

October 16-17- Taos – Pollen talk for native plant group – stayed at Casa Bienvenidos

October 26- Fred Harvey Foodie Dinner- La Fonda Hotel, SF

November 2- Dixon Art Tour

December 25- we made a full Christmas dinner for neighbors (Dan & Mike, Cristine & Paul)

Highlights of 2020

January 2-8 – Oakland; Berkeley for Bob’s 100^th BD (of course he wasn’t there!) with Marcy & Jim & families

February 4-18 – bad cough upon returning from CA (lasted a month)

February 20 – ordered “Beau” (2020 Subaru Forester) in ABQ

March 17 – picked up “Beau” in ABQ; lunch at Pappadeaux’s Seafood Restaurant (first Covid-19 rules applied)

March-December – Covid-19 Quarantine; food pickup; only go to Trader Joe’s and Eldo Mart; we cooked a full Thanksgiving dinner for neighbors (M&D-C&P); Christmas inner of ham, stuffed zucchini, sweet potatoes, and a cheesecake for neighbors (Mike &Dan)

Highlights of 2021

January-

Susan and I are still in isolation at home. Only going out for food and doctor’s appointments. Covid-19 is raging throughout the world and the in U.S. Many more cases and many more deaths. The presidential election which was won by Joe Biden had Trump’s followers acting out. On the 6^th when the Electoral College votes were to be announced in congress, the Capitol building was assaulted by Trump’s followers during the joint chambers of congress by those demonstrators who had gathered to boycott the election results.

Spring

We drove to Albuquerque to look for chairs for our TV room on April 14th. Found two motorized ones we liked at Tema. Ate out for the first time in over a year at the Sawmill Market. On the 26^th we went to eat at Harry’s Roadhouse which was our first time in a real restaurant. Ate there again with Barb Goede on May 1.

By June the state reached 60% inoculation. On our first overnight we went to Taos. Stayed at the El Monto Sagrado Resort. It was really beautiful. We also drove the Enchanted Circle from Taos to Red River, Eagle Nest and Angel Fire and went to the Saturday morning Farmer’s Market in the Plaza.

Todd and Rachel drove from Las Vegas, NV to visit us for a few days from May 27 to June 2. First time to see them since 2018!

Summer

The Covid pandemic was getting under control until the Delta Variant arrived. It seemed to attack everyone who was not vaccinated. Many were not because of various personal reasons although the shots were available to everyone. Even some who were vaccinated got mild cases, but not hospitalization and death. July was the best monsoon season we have had for years. We are still in a drought, but we got all the rain we needed for our trees and gardens. Unbelievable veggies! All the greens we could eat and wound up giving some to our neighbors each week. We are eating at various restaurants, but always looking for those with outdoor patios. We took Barb Goede on a couple of outings- Abiquiu Inn and Ojo Caliente. Great food at both places!

By August the Covid cases were bad enough in the state for the governor to mandate mask wearing in all indoor spaces for the month of September.

Susan and I had planned a trip to the Northwest for three weeks at the end of September. We had planned to fly to Seattle, rent a car, drive to Orcas Island for a few days, then go south through Washington, Oregon into California to visit her sister and brother-in-law at their home on the Russian River then go to Berkeley for a few days before flying home from Oakland. It took Susan all day to cancel everything except the flights that we must use in one year’s time.

We did decide to drive to Denver at the end of the month. We plan to stay in a hotel there for one week and take in the sights there and in the mountains and in Boulder. Should be fun! We need a vacation since we have not really had one for two years now because of Covid.

Nationally it seems that everything is happening at once. Hurricane Alma hit southern Louisiana around New Orleans and traveled to the East Coast causing never before seen water damage as far as New York City. The Taliban took over Afghanistan with the Afghanistan army dispersing and president fleeing the country giving the U.S. only a couple of weeks to get all the soldiers and U.S. allies out of the country in a huge airlift from Kabul airport. Texas passing an anti-abortion bill so that citizens could sue other citizens and collect $10,000 for helping a woman get an abortion. Covid patients in some states had completely taken up all available beds in ICUs. All this before Labor Day!

Fall

October 4-11

We finally planned another trip for the fall. We decided to drive to Denver, Colorado and stay in the Grand Hyatt Hotel downtown for a week. We would plan our excursions around the city from there. We got tickets online for a Denver Walking Tour, the Denver Botanical Garden, and the Museum of Natural History. We drove to Golden and went to the Red Rocks Amphitheater. On Saturday morning we went to the Farmer’s Market in Boulder and took a drive into the mountains from there. Beautiful weather all week!

Susan’s friend Margaret came to visit for a week (Oct. 20-26) from San Francisco. She was ill with obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, cataracts, macular degeneration, bad knees, etc. She couldn’t walk very far without being out of breath. I am sure she won’t be visiting again.

December brought with it a new variant of the Corona -19 virus, Epsilon. The world had already been suffering the deadly effects of the Delta variant. The Epsilon variant seemed to spread faster but was not as deadly. It mainly affected the unvaccinated, so I am glad that Susan and I both received our two shots plus a booster after six months. There are still too many people who have not gotten their shots for one reason or another. For some it is fear, for others it is politics. If you are a “right wing conservative” it is not “cool” to get the shot since it is supported by the “left liberals.” Crazy!!

We did have Thanksgiving dinner at our house for a few neighbors. At that point we all thought we were all protected from Covid since we were all boosted, but the increasing number of “breakthrough” cases is getting higher. Boosted people, however, are not getting as sick. We didn’t have a neighborhood Christmas dinner though as was planned, so Susan make four kinds of cookies and I took them to the neighbors.

Still wearing masks indoors as per State requirement.

Highlights of 2022

Many of the Covid restrictions were relaxed after the state’s infection rates went down:

mask wearing indoors and in schools, staying 6 ft. apart, etc. I had begun to be a weekly docent at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden again since being outside seemed safe to me. I also helped with the new docent training in February. I also began giving docent tours at the NM History Museum but wore a mask the whole time.

Spring has always been windy in New Mexico. This year the wind combined with the lack of moisture made the state a tinderbox. Fires raged in the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo mountains. The fire in the Pecos side of the Sangres was the largest ever recorded in New Mexico’s history (the Hermit’s Peak fire)! June brought an early monsoon that rained almost every day for a while.

We made several trips to Berkeley, California beginning in May to be with Susan’s sister, Marcy, and brother-in-law Jim. Marcy’s behavior began to change after a trip they had made to Denver to see their son, Stefan and his family in February. They had been told to leave early since Rupal, Stefan’s wife was upset about a sledding incident with their grandchildren. After that she begin to develop signs of dementia and paranoia.

In late August Susan and I went to Creede, CO for a week for the first time since the pandemic. We had a great time! We stayed at Antlers on the Rio, drove to the waterfalls and over the Slumgullion Pass to Lake City. We also went to three plays at the Creede Repertory Theater (Patsy Cline, Sherwood & Steel Magnolias). Everyone in the audience had to wear masks during the plays and many of the Texans were upset about it but complied.


Antlers on the Rio	Creede Theater	Waterfalls

Early in November we made another trip to Berkeley to see Marcy. We stayed in downtown Berkeley at the Hotel Shattuck Plaza. We only spent three days with Marcy and found her to be much better. On the first day she acted more normal than we had seen her since February. Still not the old Marcy, but so much better than before!

For Thanksgiving dinnner we went to our across-the-street neighbor's house, Paul and Christine. Our other neighbors, Mike and Dan were there as well. We had a pizza dinner instead of the traditional turkey and dressing!

We planned an unusual Christmas dinner at our house with the neighbors Dan & Mike, Paul & Christine, and Phil & Paula. The theme was Mexican and everyone chipped in. We all had a great time with the neighbors!

My son Todd and his wife Rachel visited us for a few days from Las Vegas over New Year's. We enjoyed their visit especiall since we hadn't seen them in quite awile!

Highlights of 2023

February- 10-12 - Susan and I went to Taos to celebrate our birthdays. We stayed at the Casa Benavides Inn on Kit Carson Road so that we could walk everywhere around town. We had a dinner at Lambert's and visited the Harwood Museum of Art and the E.L. Blumenschein Home & Museum. We are especially interested in the art of the Taos Society of Artists.


Casa Benavides Inn	Harwood Museum of Art	E.L. Blumenschein Home & Museum

Enjoying the music at Doc Martin's on Ken's 80th BD

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“And he lived happily ever after to the end of his days!” – Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings

See you on down the road!