The Autobiography of Darrell Bain,

an icon of the electronic book industry.

Darrell Bain's World of Books

Copyright © 2007 by Darrell Bain

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other-wise except brief extracts for the purpose of review, without written permission of the publisher and the copyright owner.

Twilight Times Books
P O Box 3340
Kingsport TN 37664
http://twilighttimesbooks.com/

Credits

Book cover design ~ Lida E. Quillen
Photo Credit ~ Mary Nicklow
Managing Editor ~ Ardy M. Scott

Publisher ~ Lida E. Quillen
Published in the United States of America.

Introduction

Darrell Bain's e-books have been perennial best sellers since their introduction into the young market. He has been a finalist many times for the Eppie Awards, and in 2007 he won two of them. They are the most prestigious of the E-book awards recognizing the best writing in the field. He has written about three dozen novels or non-fiction works, and more than that number of short stories, in almost every possible genre, including humor, mystery, thrillers, science fiction, and children's literature. His most notable books are The Sex Gates, Alien Infection, The Williard Brothers action/adventure series, Strange Valley, The Melanin Apocalypse, Warp Point, Space Trails, Doggie Biscuit, and Life On Santa Claus Lane and the other humorous books around the adventures of Bain and his wife while running a Christmas tree farm, all of which have proven to be very popular. Bain was named 2005 Fictionwise Author of the Year, with such notables as Anne McCaffrey and Lois McMaster Bujold as runners-up. He has been a finalist twice for the Dream Realm Award, given for best science fiction e-book of the year.

Almost all print fiction published nowadays has an accompanying e-book edition. These include most of the New York Times best selling authors, such as Stephen King, Douglas Adams, Michael Connelly, Anne McCaffrey, John Patterson, Dave Barry, Lois McMasters Bujold, Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Toombs, etc. Bain's books have competed with and in most cases outsold all these and many other best selling authors year after year in the e-book industry.

Most of his books are now available in print as well as e-books, but he says that he will always have a place in his heart for e-books, and will continue to publish in both venues because that's where he earned his large following and his many fans, some who have become personal friends.

Prologue

I may have been born to write, but if so, I took the long way around. Perhaps if I had been raised in a different environment I would have done better, earlier, but I don't like playing the 'what if?' question. I might have been in the World Trade Center building on 9/11 signing a big contract if things had been different and now I'd be dead. See? You have to take it as it comes. The only good looking back can do is keep you from making the same mistake twice. I can't even say I managed that much. What I did do is to finally become a writer, something I had wanted to do from a very early age. The fact that this autobiography is even being published is proof that I didn't do all that bad.

A writer's memoirs are something very personal and yet, rather ironically, they are put out there for the world to see. My own memoirs started when I began getting requests from fans for more information about me and my writing.

Eventually, one of my publishers asked about turning the memoirs into an e-book. I agreed, with the provision that they would be greatly expanded. Why? Well, as I was writing about my life, more and more things came to mind that I had overlooked in the time period covered by previous installments. These couldn't be conveniently incorporated into the memoirs as they were then written, and consequently got left out completely. Also, as I was writing, my wife Betty and I became involved in a major project, re-modeling the office.

And lastly, I found a hundred-page diary I wrote while in Saudi Arabia, as well as bundles and bundles of letters I had written to my mother and stepfather, some from as far back as the late 50s, but most from around 1980 when we moved out to "The Farm" and built our home, continuing until the early 90s. The letters revived many other memories. Some of this material will be included in this expanded edition of my original memoirs.

There's only one way to go about this now, and that's to start from the first original installment and begin the revisions and additional material, both from revived memories and from the old letters and diary.

I must say that the experience of writing memoirs is something I can recommend to anyone capable of typing or holding a pencil, if for no other reason than that future generations will enjoy them. One of my granddaughters followed the original installments of my memoirs avidly, always nudging me to hurry and do the next one. My stepchildren learned a lot about me. Not that I had tried to be secretive, but some things simply hadn't come up in the course of conversations and visits. And of course my own two sons learned a lot about their dad they hadn't known. Some of it isn't very complimentary but other parts show my better side, I believe. In fact, the whole story of my life, as is true for most other people, is a mix of the good, the indifferent and the bad, with all of them going into helping a person grow and change, and hopefully, improve their life and attitudes.

For me, there were two really defining moments in my life. One occurred when I was 13 years old and involved what is almost certainly the bravest thing I ever did. The other is when I met my present wife, Betty. You'll read about both of these events in the course of these memoirs, as well as many other events, some quite common but others much different from middle class American life as we know it today.

And finally, just as my fans and readers requested, I'll relate the events and parts of my life that shaped me into the writer I am today. Every writer takes a different path toward the goal of becoming a published author. I certainly did. Whether I've made much of a success of it or not is for the readers themselves to judge. I just write; I don't try to figure out why any more than most writers do. We write because something within us compels us to put words on paper and hope they're published.

Writing is a peculiar profession. Part of what makes it that way is that the supply of written material is way, way more than the demand for it. Inevitably, that leaves many writers either unpublished or forced to publish their own work at their own expense. "Vanity publishing," as it's called. I've done some of that but eventually my work began to sell on its own merits. Perhaps because I persisted. Most successful authors say that the only way to become an accomplished author is to write. And write. And write...

I hope readers will find at least parts of these memoirs interesting. The South, in the 50s through the 70s, along with my time in the military, and my final marriage to my wife Betty, were particularly formative periods of my life. There's some good and some bad. I don't promise to completely bare my soul, but what I do write will be as true as memory serves.

Sidebar on memory: As psychologists and scientists delve deeper and deeper into our brains and minds and discover more and more about the way we process information, some interesting facts have come to light. Our memories aren't nearly as accurate as we think they are. Our brains are wired to "fill in" what it thinks should be in our memories, much as we "fill in" words when reading by seeing what we think should be there. I'm sure you've heard of how unreliable eyewitness accounts are. That's because our minds don't work the way we think they do. We constantly revise and edit our memories. I've listened to some people I know describe events in ways that are pretty far removed from the way I remember them, yet I saw no evidence of deliberate deception on their part. It was simply that they "remembered" the event differently than I did. People will fill in facts and figures when they aren't certain; they will add or subtract colors and words and clothing and myriad other items when relating their descriptions of events or people.

All this is my way of saying that my memories may not be exact. I shall do my best to be as accurate as I can, but memories from childhood, especially young childhood, are apt to vary from the literal truth. Also, memories from our very youngest days are badly fragmented, like a film a mad editor has cut to pieces, leaving more blanks than clips, then tossed into the air and mixed and randomized. And as we get into our later years, say from ten years old and up, our memories are still just fragments of all that has taken place in our lives. What we best remember are those events with emotional overtones—but they are also the memories most likely to be distorted.

One more caveat: our memories from when we were very young are not only badly fragmented, but we probably remember things in no particular order. Children aren't nearly so aware of time, in a linear fashion, like we are as adults.

Now, having explained my reservations, and rambled along explaining what I hope to accomplish here, I guess we can get on with the stories, which is what our memories are; a series of stories which make up our lives.

Part One

I was born in Shreveport, Louisiana way back in 1939. Has it really been that long? It doesn't seem possible, but of course it is. Time is a funny thing. No matter how old you are, all your past life seems to have passed in the merest instant. In that sense, we're all the same age.

My first memories are from the time we lived in a little white house in Shreveport, in no particular order. I can't possibly sort them out into a timetable.

My parents were poor but honest, no cliché. Real poor, due more to my father's habits of drinking and gambling than anything else.

I can remember that small home in Shreveport very clearly. It was near the railroad marshalling yard. We lived on sort of a knoll so we could look down into the yards. Dad worked there and was able to walk to work. I don't remember if the house was part of a subdivision or not, or even whether there was such a thing back then, although I'm pretty sure there was.

Thinking back, I get the horrors picturing me as a child of no more than three or possibly four, when I frequently lit the gas heater in the living room on cold mornings while Mother and Dad were still asleep. (Even then, I was an early bird—and just recently read an article describing the "early bird" gene, possessed by approximately 0.2% of the population. I've always gotten up and gone to bed about four hours earlier than other people outside the family, but within the family, most of us have the early gene). I even remember being dressed in nothing but a pair of underwear shorts. Why they allowed the very dangerous practice of letting such young children light the stoves in the morning is a mystery to me. Maybe kids were expected to light the stove back then. I simply don't know, but it would certainly come back to haunt both me and my parents just a few years later.

I remember my two favorite cousins, Larry and Jerry, coming to visit one year, along with their parents. That was also the first time I saw Dad gamble. He and my two uncles shot dice in the living room one day. I can still see the piles of dollar bills and quarters and half dollars. Considering that this was way back during WWII in the early 40s, that was a pretty fair amount of money.

Rationing was in effect, though I didn't know it. One morning there was no coffee. Dad got annoyed and picked the previous day's coffee grounds out of the kitchen trash to make some. I told Mother about the incident later in life and she swears it couldn't have happened, but I remember it clearly.

I was fascinated with the way Mother mixed the yellow color into the blocks of pale white stuff to get something that looked like butter. It wasn't butter, of course, just margarine. That's how margarine came back then. A package of yellow color and a block of vegetable oil, or whatever it was made of. It was mixed by squishing the ingredients together by hand until they were well blended, then putting into a wooden mold and shaped into a mound with little decorative curly cues on it.

I think Mother was very happy during the year or so we lived in that little house. She grew up during the Great Depression when times were very hard. I don't remember my first years, of course, but I do have letters from an uncle and a very abbreviated family history written by my mother late in her life.

I'll produce a few excerpts from Mother's history here, even though I don't remember it, to give a little flavor to what I'll be writing about later.

____________________________

I'll write more about farm life later on and how things went wrong from my perspective rather than Mother's. For now I'll continue for a moment with Mother's memoirs. She wrote a little about each of us kids. Here's what she wrote about me.

______________________________

Mother and Dad lived in a one room log cabin up in Arkansas when they first married, and they moved around a lot for several years. My two older sisters were born during that time. Dad made 50 cents a day, when he could find work. He spent two years in prison for making moonshine to earn money back before he and Mother married. He probably wouldn't have gotten more than a fine or a couple of days in jail ordinarily, but he shot one of the revenuers in the leg when they found the still. Anyway, after the hardscrabble existence, I'm sure that little white house with a bathroom, running water, electricity and gas heat must have seemed like heaven to Mother, especially with her having four young kids, two of them not yet potty trained, and disposable diapers not even on the horizon.

I don't know what brought Mother and Dad to Shreveport, but I think it must have been the impending war and the availability of work in a "big city." It was large compared to the little town of Mena in western Arkansas where they had been born and lived, for sure. He got a job with the railroad as a brakeman.

I was born in 1939, the first of the kids to call Louisiana their native state. My two younger brothers were born while we lived by the railroad yards, as well as another sister who died shortly after birth from a heart defect, one which is easily cured these days. So at the time we left there, I had two older sisters and two younger brothers (though now that I think about it, my youngest brother may have been born right after we moved from there).

My first dream (or the first I remember) occurred in that little house. I dreamed we had gone to Arkansas to see Grandma. I was bitterly disappointed when I woke up and discovered it was only a dream. I think kids love their grandparents so much because they are always cheerful and indulgent. Not having to put up with the kids 24 hours a day, every day, makes a difference, as we know now!

I was forced to take naps during most of the time we lived by the railroad yards. I remember one day when the sun was shining brightly, creating numerous sunbeams peeking through the bedroom curtains, and Mother put me to bed. I lay there thinking, I'm a big boy. I shouldn't have to take naps. It's all sunshiny outside. Why do I have to take a nap? I think I went to sleep right afterward.

One day Dad took me with him down to the railroad yards. He was a brakeman, but knew all the engineers. He got one of them to give me a ride, just me and the engineer up in that cab that seemed to be a hundred feet off the ground. The engineer blew the horn, the long wailing sound of the coal burning engine. I was in heaven, certain that no other boy in the world had ever gotten to ride in a real steam engine. The engineer even tried to let me wear his hat with the white ticking, but of course it was a little too large.

There was probably more than one trip to Arkansas to see all the relatives up there, but I only remember one which was taken from the little house. We rode a passenger train for hours and hours. The seats were like little loveseats facing each other, always colored a dirty green, it seemed. Perhaps that was to conceal the inevitable stains and dirt they accumulated from constant use. We rode past long rows of cotton fields where I could see Negroes out picking the white cotton boles, dragging their sacks behind under the hot summer sun. Little puffs of dust would rise from around each one as he or she moved the bags a few feet farther up the row. We could see mountains in the distance, blue and far away, and then suddenly we were in them, with high slate ridges above and below, and trees, pine and sweet gum and oak, growing almost sideways at times. And just like on a car trip with kids today, we kept asking Mother and Dad, "Are we almost there now?"

It was for grandmas and grandpas that I loved to go to Arkansas. One set of grandparents lived up in the mountains on a farm. There were cows and horses and pigs and chickens. The hogs were in big pens. When I went to examine them from a closer viewpoint, grandma grabbed me and pulled me back several steps from the pen. "Hogs are dangerous," she told me. To prove it, she pulled her long dress up above her ankles and showed me the terrible scars on one of her legs where she had fallen into the pen one day while feeding them. Hungry pigs make no distinction between humans and any other kind of food. All my uncles on my Dad's side of the family hunted and fished constantly. It was a fascinating experience for a little boy, and grandma made the most delicious pies and cakes!

The other set of grandparents lived in the little town of Mena, except I never knew Granddad Masters. He died of tuberculosis before I was born. I feel like I knew him, though. Mother always said I took after him. He had a wanderlust, the itchy feet that are both a plague and a blessing for me and my brothers. All of us inherited them. Granddad also tried to write. When he couldn't get published, he bought a printing press and published his own work. I would give a pretty penny to see some of his writing now but it had vanished by the time I was old enough to want to read it. He taught himself taxidermy. All of us kids were fascinated when we visited Grandma and went upstairs and admired the big bobcat he had killed and mounted. Curiously, the bobcat grew smaller as we grew older! Granddad painted some and worked in various fields, never satisfied, and by all accounts was a man out of place, never finding whatever it was he searched for. He died in his 40s after battling TB for years.

Grandmother heated the house with a coal burning stove. It was the first time I ever saw coal burning. It fascinated me. I could hardly wait each morning to see her start a fire with what looked like black rocks. The only other heat was from the kitchen stove and a couple of little gas burners in other parts of the house. In later years, my brother Gary and I and my oldest sister, Snooky, would live with Grandma in the same house for a while and go to school right down the hill.

In that little town in Arkansas, I loved to play with my cousins, Larry and Jerry. We were all three the same age. And of course my next youngest brother, Gary, always tagged along. I was tasked with "watching" him. I doubt I did a very good job, because the best I remember, I was just aggravated that he was always around when I wanted to talk and play with Larry and Jerry. On the other hand, we had fun when we were alone together, and sometimes we three let him play with us.

That's about all I remember from that part of my life. When I was four years old, we moved to a place about ten miles from Shreveport, onto a dairy farm near a very small town named Keithville. I didn't know it at the time, but Mother was bitterly against the move. She wanted nothing more to do with farms after living with amenities like inside plumbing and electricity. Of course, she had nothing to say about it. Back then, men made the decisions.

The next excerpt will begin with life on the farm. It will probably take a good number of pages to cover that part of my life even though it only lasted a few years.

Before that, though, I'd like to reproduce a letter sent to me by my uncle after he started reading the memoirs. I really had no idea of how hard times were back in the 30s and early 40s until reading Mother's little history and my uncle's letters.

And another letter from my uncle:

Note: At this writing, T.C. is 86 years old and still going strong.

Part Two

Before getting into this period of my life, I want to go back and relate another memory from the Little White House period in Shreveport in the first section. Like all boys, I imitated my Dad, even at that early age. The other day when a couple of the great grandkids were visiting, an event occurred which jogged this memory. I often observed Dad stretched out on the couch, still fully dressed except for having taken his shoes off, and reading the newspaper. One day I did the same thing, even though I didn't know how to read yet. I got a piece of the discarded newspaper, stretched out on the couch and crossed my feet, exactly like Dad did, then held the newspaper up and pretended I was reading. That is my first memory about reading. One of my sisters, the one two years older than me, wasn't in school yet. She told me, "Oh you can't read!" And I couldn't just yet, not at three years old.

Now to the event which jogged that memory. When the kids were visiting, my great granddaughter Cheyenne, who is five years old, climbed up into my lap. First she took my glasses from atop a book lying on my chairside table and put them on. (I can only imagine what blurred vision she must have had!) Next she picked up my book and held it, just like I do when I'm reading in my easy chair, and then she said, "Now I'm reading, just like Grandpa." She was very serious, and it made me feel great that I was obviously setting a good example. Once they get hooked on the printed word, the whole wide universe is open to them.

And now, on to the farm in Keithville.

Later in life when I would come back home to visit, Mother and I spent hours in the mornings, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and talking about everything under the sun. Several times she mentioned to me how much she hated moving to the farm, and looking back, I can see why.

I don't remember the move at all. We were living in the little white house in Shreveport and the next thing I knew, we were out on the 500-acre farm near the very tiny town of Keithville, about 10, maybe 15 miles south of Shreveport. I didn't realize then that it was primarily a dairy farm. Snooky, my oldest sister, four years my senior, soon was taught to milk cows because there were no milking machines. All thirty cows had to be milked every morning (and maybe every evening, I'm not sure about that), and remember, Dad still had his full time job with the railroad. I was never old enough to milk, but Dad and Snooky let me try on several occasions. I could never get the milk to come out. I do remember the odd sensation of holding the teat in my hand, though. And watching Dad send a stream of milk to the barn cat. The cat didn't have a name until we kids gave it one. Pitty Pat Kitty Cat Bain. Pitty Pat loved the milk. The stream Dad directed toward his mouth would spatter his whole face but he never minded. He would lick what he could off his face, use his paw to wipe more off, then lick his paw. When he couldn't get any more, he would shake his head to rid his face of the rest, then begin meowing for more! I'm referring to Pitty Pat as a male, but he (she) might have been female. I seem to remember some kittens, but I can't be sure.

This reminds me of an excerpt from a brief genealogy/history which Snooky put together before she was incapacitated by her stroke a few years ago. Snooky loved the farm and so did Dad. When Snooky got her first autograph book, Dad wrote a little verse in it.

The cows were everywhere. Me and Gary, my next youngest brother, also played everywhere, including in the pasture, cows or no cows. Once we saw some of the cows resting, and as nonchalantly as sitting down to dinner, I climbed up on the back of one of the cows and sat there like a Mahomet on an elephant. It's a wonder the cow didn't become annoyed and stand up with me on it. I have no idea what would have happened, but it probably wouldn't have been good. Either the cow would have stepped on me, or I might have broken something in the fall.

Kids can get into the darnedest predicaments. I have only the vaguest memory of standing behind a farm truck while it was backing up. It knocked me down and passed on over me without a wheel touching me. All I got were a few bruises. Looking back, I may not even remember the event. I may well have created the memory after hearing the story so many times. Remember my discourse about memory?

Another predicament involved Gary, in which I became a hero. I think my cousins Larry and Jerry and their parents were visiting. There was an old bayou on the farm where a pier had been constructed years in the past from planks. It was old and rotten, but as kids will do, we walked out on it anyway. Naturally, one of the rotten planks collapsed and Gary fell through the hole. I just managed to grab him by the head and prevent him from slipping on through and down beneath the pier, where he would surely have drowned. I held on while either Larry or Jerry ran back to the house to find an adult. I still had him by the head, holding on for dear life, when Mother and Dad got there. I don't remember if we got spanked for playing there (after me being lauded for saving Gary's life and Gary comforted for still being alive), but I would bet we did. At any rate, I don't remember ever playing there again.

My youngest brother Michael was barely toddling when another event happened, one which was my first introduction to calamity. It was the Christmas season, I believe, and cold. The wood stove was going good. In fact, the sides of it were red hot. The red color must have attracted Mike's attention. Before anyone could grab him, he took a couple of wobbly baby steps, then put his hand out to steady himself. The flat of his hand landed squarely on that red hot portion of the stove. He screamed and screamed, but it was a couple of seconds before anyone could get to him. When he was yanked away from the stove, some of his charred skin stayed there, burning with a sickly sweet odor.

Remember, this was back in the early 40s and we lived way out in the country. And possibly no one realized right at first just how serious the burn to Mike's hand was. Someone suggested tea, and soon his hand was soaking in a pan of cold, strong tea. I don't remember much else except occasionally seeing Mike with one hand ending in a huge ball of gauze. Probably it was on one of the times he got to come home to visit between bouts of plastic surgery, because he stayed in the charity hospital in Shreveport for three months, having skin removed from his thighs and grafted to his hand. On one of those morning talks with Mother in later years, she had tears in her eyes as she told me how Mike stayed in the hospital so long he began calling the nurses "Mother."

Remember me telling about how I lit the gas heater in the little while house in Shreveport when I was only three or four years old? And how I said it would have repercussions later? It did. I still knew how to strike a match, and so did my sister Carla, two years my senior. I have no earthly idea why we did what we did. Certainly Carla should have known better. For that matter, I probably should have, too. Be that as it may, one day Carla and I found ourselves alone for a period of time and we went exploring. We got into the closet built under the stairs and found a box of matches there. And then, with not a care in the world, we sat down in that big closet and began striking matches and throwing them away from us. Inevitably, one of them started something in the closet burning.

The next couple of hours were exciting, to say the least. The closet was situated beneath the stairs leading to the second story. That was also where Dad stored his shotgun shells. Between the closet and staircase being in flames and the shotgun shells exploding and men and women running back and forth with tubs and pans of water, it's a wonder we didn't get trampled. Or perhaps we simply stayed out of sight, knowing that we were responsible. I don't remember, but I surely do remember seeing the efforts to put out the fire and hearing the shells going off. I don't know where the other men came from but probably they were there working for Dad. It's a pure wonder that the whole house didn't burn down, but it didn't. I don't remember the spanking, but I know I must have gotten one. And Carla, too.

And while I'm talking about Carla, she was always a sickly child when young. Mother and Dad both told me later that several times they came close to losing her, but she survived the sicknesses, only to come down with tuberculosis. Back in those days there wasn't much to do about TB. Maybe they used sulfa drugs. Penicillin was not yet on the civilian market, although it was beginning to be used to treat war wounds which got infected. Streptomycin, an antibiotic which was effective against TB, hadn't been discovered yet.

Anyway, the treatment for TB in those dark ages was complete bed rest. For six months, Carla wasn't allowed out of bed, not even to go to the bathroom. The rest of us kids had to help with her, emptying the bedpan and so forth. And relatives helped out by soliciting everyone they knew to wrap a present for her. They were delivered in a huge box, and Carla was allowed to open one present a day in order to escape the boredom of always having to stay in bed. Occasionally I would find myself being a bit envious of her getting to unwrap a gift every single day, but mostly I just felt sorry for her, and well I might have. The treatment was based on ignorance. She would have been much better off being able to exercise as much as she could and getting some fresh air and sunshine, but we didn't know any better—that was the state of medicine in those days.

Carla eventually recovered, but there were other injuries and sicknesses that seemed to dog our steps.

One day Dad was repairing the back steps and left a board lying on the ground while he went to get some tool or other. It had a huge nail driven through it and sticking upright. I was out playing and came running pell mell and stepped squarely on that nail. It went all the way through my foot and poked up the skin on top, making it look like a little tent. Now today, that would garner a trip to the Emergency Room, all kinds of antibiotics, cleansing of the wound with probes, tetanus shots, bandages and so on. But that was then, on a farm out in the country. My treatment consisted of pouring kerosene (which we called coal oil) into my puncture wound to clean it out, then wrapping it with strips of bandage torn from an old pillow case. Know what? It healed perfectly.

Speaking of kerosene, it had many uses back then. The house was entirely lit with kerosene lamps. Trimming the wicks of those things to make them burn with a bright light is an art, as I found out when Betty and I moved to our own farm and we were without electricity after our first hurricane. I never could get the blasted things to burn right.

Once there was a jar of kerosene setting on a table or floor or somewhere in reach of Michael. This was after his hand had healed (which left it scarred and somewhat shriveled, along with numerous scars on his thighs from patches of skin being removed and grafted to his hand). Kerosene is a clear liquid. To Mike, it must have looked just like water and he was thirsty. He picked up the jar and drank enough to make him very ill. That required a trip to the hospital for injury to his lungs, but he survived.

Another time I got hurt by simply doing nothing but watching while Snooky, my oldest sister, was carving on a piece of wood to make something, possibly a butter churn or the like. Well, maybe I wasn't exactly doing nothing. I moved in close to see what she was making just at the time when the big butcher knife she was using slipped. It whacked me right on my upper thigh, making a cut three inches long and a half inch deep. Again, that was an injury that today would require a trip to the Emergency Room. All I got was the inevitable kerosene rinse and a bandage. I still have a beautiful scar from the cut that should have had about a dozen stitches.

Homemade ice cream was a great treat back then. We didn't have an ice cream freezer, not even a hand-cranked one. The ice cream was made in a metal one-gallon bucket that the ribbon cane syrup came in. (For ages I didn't know there was any other kind of syrup. Ribbon cane was cheap and that's what we got.) Somehow or other, a staph bug must have been in the cream. We all got food poisoning. It felt like I was dying and it looked like the rest of the family was dying, but we all survived. And guess where the blame for the food poisoning went? The adults were firmly convinced it came from making the ice cream in the metal syrup bucket! So why did they do it? Just a risk, they said, and it didn't happen often, but occasionally the metal bucket caused food poisoning. An old wives tale of course, but for years I believed it.

On a dairy farm, it was a dead certain cinch that we made our own butter. One of the hated chores of childhood was the monotonous task of sitting in a chair and pushing the wooden churner up and down until the butter finally congealed from the cream. It was exhausting, but had to be done. Sometimes Mother used the chore as punishment. It made us behave pretty good. Once the butter was ready, it was put into wooden molds, then into the icebox. The icebox wasn't electric; no electricity, remember? As Dad came home from work, a couple of times a week, he'd stop by the ice house and pick up a block of ice.

One winter we had an ice storm, then sleet, then freezing rain on top of that, until ice was everywhere about four inches thick. For a while Dad didn't have to bring ice home. The old house had a tin roof. One day when the thaw began, there was a terrible rumbling noise. It sounded like the world was coming apart, but it was only the melting ice sliding off the roof. It's a good thing no one was underneath or they would have either been killed or seriously injured.

Another illness we all got was whooping cough. God, I can remember plain as day how horrible that felt, coughing as if my lungs were going to come apart, unceasing coughing, coughing day and night to exhaustion, to the point of not being able to breathe, to feeling as if I were suffocating and still coughing. How on earth Mother managed all of us kids with the illness at about the same time and still took care of all her other work is beyond me.

The farm layout was something like this. There was the big two-story house with a big cistern next to it for water to the kitchen (but there weren't any inside bathrooms; we had an outhouse), a pump house where a gasoline motor powered a pump to pump water from a well to the cistern, a big barn for the cows, some corrals and pig pens and an old rundown tenet house up the dirt road to the gravel road leading to Keithville. There was also a big iron pot out in the center of the back yard. This was where Mother washed clothes, by building a fire around the pot and sloshing the clothes around in boiling water with a big stick. Oh yes, she made our own soap from lard and ashes, too, yellowish gray stuff cut into chunks the size of a grown person's hand.

Occasionally a frog would somehow get into the cistern and die. We always knew because the water would start tasting rotten. It's amazing how a little frog weighing less than an ounce could make all that water smell bad. The solution was to drain the cistern and find the frog, then refill it. (I think—there may have been another way to find the pesky thing because I don't actually remember it being drained.) The outhouse usually had Sears & Roebuck or Montgomery Ward catalogs to use for toilet paper. The pages were slick and didn't work the best, but the upside was you always had something to read.

Every evening except in bad weather or when it was extremely cold, Snooky would take Gary and me (and later Mike) out to the cistern and give us a bath from the faucet there. I can still remember jumping up and down and trying to get away when the water was really cold, but Snooky brooked no nonsense—we got our baths!

And here's a funny. After a time, the outhouse would begin to get full and smell. One day I saw Dad with some corncobs and asked him where he was going. He said, "To take a shit" and went off into the woods. A few minutes later, Mother asked me where Dad was. I told her, "He went to take a shit." And that was my introduction to cursing. Before that I had no idea there were words you weren't supposed to use in polite company. Mother really let me know there were!!

Ever so often a great aunt who was a nurse would paint our throats with Merthiolate or something like that. I think that was supposed to keep us from getting some kind of infection like tonsillitis, but I don't know exactly what. And it may not have been Merthiolate. That was what was used for cuts and scrapes (and later proved to be ineffective). All I remember is how bad it tasted. Years later I had my revenge. I got to draw her blood when I was working at as a medical technologist at a hospital in Shreveport!

Hog killing in the fall was always a big affair. The hogs would be slaughtered out under the persimmon trees about the time the persimmons were getting ripe, then the meat cut up. The Negroes would come for the intestines to make chitlins. They would grab a long length of intestine and squeeze it empty by running their hands down over it. I couldn't understand why they wanted that part of the hogs but other things were going on and I never asked. Part of the kids' job was to grind the meat by hand for sausage. Mother would mix it with seasoning and form it into patties, then pack it in kegs of lard, which had been rendered from the fat of the hogs. For days after the slaughter we had fresh pork, then it was back to salt pork or smoked ham. I must have eaten several tons of salt pork up until I was eleven or twelve.

We had a few horses. Gary and I would ride them bareback, but one day I got kicked—and I never got on a horse again until I was working in Saudi Arabia and rode one through the deep canyons to the old city of Petra. I still don't like horses, partly because they scare me, I'm sure.

Dad always had some Negro men working for him at one time or another. He would calculate their wages using a pencil and writing on the side of a shed. The Negroes were always dressed practically in rags, with shoes split and held together with rope or twine. I thought they looked sad in those old clothes.

One really poignant memory was one day, out on the dirt road, a Negro man was taking a break from plowing. I went over to talk to him. He looked down at me after we had exchanged a few words and asked, "Whut you rather be, a white man or colored man?" For some reason the question embarrassed me. "White, I guess," I answered. The man wiped sweat off his brow and looked into some far distance then back down at me. "So would I," he said. The memory remained so vivid that after I was grown I wrote a story about it and submitted it to The Saturday Evening Post, the first submission of my writing life. I never heard anything back.

I had a vivid imagination even before starting school, as Mother remarked. One day I noticed that after I had been out playing on the dirt road by myself, and started home, that no matter how fast I went, the sun remained at about the same spot in the sky. When I got back to the house I told Mother, "Mr. Sun followed me home." She laughed, one of the few times I can remember her laughing from then on. I also had an imaginary friend, and either a green or purple alligator. I don't remember that one. Mother told me about it later on in life.

Somehow, even with working full time on the railroad and running the farm, Dad found time to hunt and fish. Every fall, he went duck hunting, then it was time to pluck the ducks of their downy feathers to make pillows and mattresses. There's nothing so soft as a feather mattress!

Dad went squirrel hunting a lot. He had a squirrel dog named Tracks. He was our dog as well and stayed with the kids all the time. He was a very special dog and much admired by other hunters. Dad also trapped every fall, using his vacation time for it. He trapped possum, coon and mink, then skinned them and dried the pelts on boards. The mink pelts were especially valuable and he was always extremely careful when skinning them not to make any nicks where they weren't supposed to be. I believe trapping was where the Christmas money came from.

About the only thing we ever did as a family was to go fishing on the bayou. Mother loved to fish, but got to do very little of it. Her job was to build a fire, clean the fish, and cook them. They were so good, fresh from the water, and of course I didn't realize how much Mother would have loved to be fishing instead of cleaning and cooking! In later years she got to do a good bit of fishing with a friend, making up for lost time.

We had a battery radio for a while. The batteries were about as big as a car battery is today. One night we all listened to the Billy Conn and Joe Louis world heavyweight fight. We also listened to some radio programs. The Shadow is about the only one I remember.

All this was happening during World War II. There was rationing of almost everything. Mostly it didn't bother me except cakes were a rare treat since sugar was rationed.

I started school out there on the farm. We had to walk down the dirt road to the gravel road to catch the bus, about half a mile (not the ten miles through snow you hear your grandparents brag about). The best days were when the bus broke down and we didn't have to go to school.

I already knew how to read by the time school started. We all started in the first grade. There was no kindergarten, or if there was, it wasn't available to us.

We had very few neighbors. I only remember two families. The Millers lived right up the road from the bus stop. I thought it was great fun to discover that Mrs. Miller and I had the same birthday. Then there were the Goins, who had a son my age. For a year of so we hung around together, exploring the streams, and fishing and hunting together. Dad wouldn't let me use his shotgun and Bryant, my friend, was scared of his Dad's double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun. I was braver and said I could shoot it. I got my chance one day when we came upon a huge water moccasin sunning itself on a log over a creek. I took off my T-shirt and balled it up under my regular shirt to make a pad for my shoulder, then aimed and fired. I didn't intend to, but I let go with both barrels! The snake parted, with half of itself falling off on one side of the log and the other half falling off the other side. Bryant was envious of me and eventually he couldn't stand it any more and learned to shoot the gun himself.

There was something else about the Goins that seemed rather strange but made me envious. His mother and father played games with the kids. Of course there were only three of them, but nevertheless, they would get together on nights I stayed at his house and we'd take turns drawing cartoons or making up other games. They quickly found out I could think faster than anyone else there but didn't hold it against me at all. It was fun and I wondered why our family didn't do things like that. The only game we ever played together was the rare game of Forty-two or checkers.

One Christmas when our radio was either broken or the battery was dead, Gary and I got to go to the Millers and listen to Santa Claus on the radio. I absolutely believed in Santa Claus until I was six, but that Christmas the whole family went to Shreveport for the Christmas shopping. On the way home, I started looking in the big paper bags and discovered some toy guns. "Put those back!" Mother ordered very strictly, and I did. Then the guns appeared under the Christmas tree and I knew immediately that Santa was a fake.

One Christmas, cousins Larry and Jerry were visiting, along with the aunts and uncles. Uncle T.C. gave Gary and me a real metal gyroscope. It cost a dollar, way back in 1945, so it must have been an expensive gift. It was wonderful the things that gyroscope would do! You wound it up with a piece of string, and pulled the string to get it to spinning. Then you could make it stand upright on a piece of taut string, lean over and not fall and do all kinds of fascinating things. That might have been the impetus for my first interest in science.

I have to laugh today about the zero tolerance policy of no weapons at school. Back then, every boy from about four or five years old had his own pocket knife that he carried everywhere, including to school. Occasionally a boy would get a paddling for using his knife to carve his initials on his desk, but that was all that ever happened. We would spend recess at school playing mumblety-peg. I don't remember the rules now, but you flipped your knife with the both blades opened, one at an angle to the other, and tried to make the blade stick in the soil when the knife landed. We were forever carving something or other. School teachers and administrators of today probably have a hard time imagining every boy in school carrying a knife, but we did. And the greatest calamity of a young boy's life was losing his pocket knife. It happened frequently, but poor as we were, our knives were always replaced. They must have been pretty cheap, or Mother and Dad felt they were very necessary to a little boy.

The war ended while I lived out on the farm. I can remember Dad saying, "The boys will be coming home now." And I remember seeing the headlines, covering half the front page: JAPS QUIT!

By the second grade, I was thinking how silly the Dick and Jane readers were. I always zoomed through mine in two days or so and was bored stiff the rest of the year in reading class. Writing class was boring. We sat for hours making loops and whorls and other symbols as practice for when we were taught cursive writing. I have no idea whether it did any good or not.

We gave each other valentines each year, to whomever we wanted, and compared the number each kid got. They were dropped into a big box, then on Valentine's Day, the teacher handed them out. There was no worry about someone's psyche being scarred because someone else got more valentines than another person. It was just a rule of nature that some kids were more popular and we thought nothing of it.

It also seemed natural that there were "rich" kids and poor kids, country kids and "town" kids. I never felt deprived because our shirts were frequently made from feed sacks and everyone knew it, even though the sacks came in colored patterns. What did bother me was that Dad made Gary and me wear overalls. We stood out from all the boys who wore regular jeans. One day I came home crying and told Mother I wasn't going to go back to school unless I had some jeans. See, there was pressure to keep up with the fashions even back then! And even in grade school!

There was one boy who was so rich that his mother picked him up at school each day rather than have him ride the school bus. By the time we passed his house on the way home in the bus, I could see him out in his yard riding his handsome spotted pony. I would wave to him and sometimes he would wave back if he saw me. I always wondered what it would be like to live like that.

One day an airplane zoomed overhead so fast it left its sound behind. It was too high to see that it was a jet, but we all thought it amazing a plane could go that fast!

I guess Dad was drinking more by then because when there was work to do on the farm, Dad always had a big tub of beer in ice water.

One year there was a flood. The water came up almost to the back door. It wiped out all the crops. The same year prices fell and Dad couldn't stay with the farm. It was the summer before I started third grade when the farm failed and we moved to Summer Grove, a little town closer to Shreveport.

In the little family history that Mother wrote, she remarked that the farm was a good place for kids. I'm really not so sure. Certainly there was plenty of room to roam and play, but best as I remember, we had very little contact with other kids until we started school in the first grade. I think this lack of interaction may have been detrimental in a sense. I can't say for certain, but I sure didn't know much about other kids except my own siblings. Maybe that was enough, and certainly we weren't the only ones in similar circumstances. A large part of America was still rural in the early 40s. It's actually a moot point, since I'll never know how being alone so much, especially after my sisters both started school, affected me.

There was one interaction which probably affected me and my next younger brother more than either of us realized for many, many years. After Gary learned to walk, he began tagging my footsteps everywhere I went. He called me "Thon," his best approximation of "Son" or "Sonny" which the rest of the family called me. For two years we played together almost exclusively with each other during the day and of course, being the older, I was always the leader. It strikes me as rather ironic now that this didn't lead to me developing any sort of leadership skills early on. I had to learn them all the hard way, through study and experience, mostly after entering the military, and it still doesn't come naturally to me and it never will.

Looking back, I think perhaps the "rich" town kids, who had so many more material advantages than us, just naturally became the leaders in elementary school. We poorer kids looked up to and envied them in some ways which weren't really important but which seemed like it at the time.

We moved from the farm to the little hamlet of Summer Grove between my second and third grade if I remember right.

Part Three

In relating my life so far I've failed to describe the social mores of family life in the 40s. It was quite different then than now. Even as children there were chores to do, but they were very clearly delineated between boy jobs and girl jobs. All Gary and I had to worry about was chopping and bringing in kindling and wood for Mother to start the fire in the kitchen wood stove. Other than that, we were pretty much free. My older sisters had to help with the dishes, washing and hanging out clothes to dry and bringing them in, cleaning house, shelling peas, and many other "girl" jobs. Mother would never think of asking the boys to help with any of those chores, and Dad wouldn't have permitted it if she had, for fear of turning us into "sissies." My brothers and I grew up with the attitude that such duties were "women's work."

It took many years, even after I was grown, to get rid of some of those attitudes and I imagine I've never completely cleared my mind of all of them. My wife says I've done pretty well but I don't know whether my previous wives would say that or not. Best as I remember, I left all the housework to Connie when we were married because she didn't work outside the home and I usually had part time jobs besides my military salary to make ends meet. With Pam, my next wife, we shared household duties somewhat, but I was working far more hours than her so she still got the bulk of the housework.

Another factor which helped shape my life as a youngster was the lack of outside media entertainment, or even friends to play with. For you younger readers, try to imagine growing up with no television, no phone, no movies (we lived a long way from the nearest theater and wouldn't have had the money even if there had been one close), no electronic games (and not even any board games—again, no money), We had very few books or magazines in the house (no money). We didn't live near any other kids we could play with other than one older boy. There was no library within reach. In short, any amusement other than playing cards, we had to devise for ourselves.

This usually amounted to Gary and me, and sometimes Michael (our youngest brother) as he became old enough to join us, making up games. We played Pirate by using an old door laid on the ground and pretending it was a raft or ship. We played cave men by using tall dead and hardened weeds which resembled spears. We made bows and arrows. We played along the railroad tracks, always finding interesting things to do there. And there were always Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs to look at. We would sit for hours thumbing through the pages and wishing for the cornucopia of goods displayed in them, especially toward Christmas. I always wished for expensive toys, knowing I would wind up with clothes instead. It's a wonder I learned to love books so much given those circumstances, but I did.

One of the highlights of each summer was Vacation Bible School. I hated VBS because it didn't seem fair to have to go to "school" during summer, and for me it was very boring besides. Except for one thing: kids were asked to memorize Bible verses, and free books were given to those of us who memorized a set amount of verses. Each year I would strain my little mind memorizing volumes of Bible verses, winning as many books as I possibly could, which always amounted to every one they offered. The books were religiously oriented, but for all that, fun to read because they were boys' adventures and showed me a life far removed from my own, but one which was displayed as normal for most kids, i.e., a family where the parents had the time and inclination to pay lots of attention to their offspring, and describing such things as cars and car trips, movies, friends, new clothes, boating, nice homes and so on. It made me realize that such things must be a normal part of life for most kids.

For us, Mother was far too busy and worried about having money to feed and clothe us to show much affection and Dad was seldom there, and there certainly wasn't any money for toys, and such things as lawn mowers and boats and parks were as far removed from our life as another planet. Dad was spending increasing amounts of time in bars and gambling away his salary. I have no idea what inclined him in that direction, but it didn't make for a very normal or typical life. I might mention that I've learned over the years that Dad was quite a rounder even before he and Mother were married.

So what did I do when not in school? Well, first off, I read every scrap of printed material that came my way, such as it was. The elementary school "library" consisted of two small shelves of books in a coat closet. I made short work of them, and so far as I remember they were never changed. Sometimes a newspaper or magazine made its way to our house and regardless of what it was, I read it. One time a couple of adult books, one on the history of astronomy and one on the history of microbiology, somehow appeared in our house. I think I was the only one who read them, but I devoured both, reading over and over again about the pioneers and great minds of those two sciences, from Galileo to Hubble to Pasteur to Koch. From that point on I was always fascinated by science.

Dad thought I was kind of strange for liking books better than hunting and fishing. When he spent any time at all with me, it was trying to get me interested in hunting and the outdoors. When my eyes became irritated from reading one day, Mother took me somewhere to have my eyes examined. It showed that I needed glasses, but Dad wouldn't hear of it, even though the railroad insurance would have paid for them. He told me he didn't want me to look like a sissy. Fortunately, my eyes weren't that bad and no permanent damage was done.

There were lots of woods, fields and streams to play in, and Gary and I roamed them with never a thought of getting lost or getting into trouble. We made fishing poles from saplings and corks from wood. We made kites from old newspapers and flour and water paste. Best as I remember, none of those kites ever flew very well, but we kept trying. We were forever making bows and arrows to play with, not good ones, but they amused us. Our favorite toys were homemade slingshots, and the signal lights along the railroad tracks were almost irresistible targets—until a railroad detective came out to investigate. We denied doing the deed but found other things to shoot at after that.

Slingshots were commonly called "nigger shooters" by kids and adults alike, with never a thought of giving offense to anyone. Negroes in the 40s in the South were treated as practically an alien species, not fit for anything except menial labor, and the word "nigger" was used as casually as any other descriptive part of the language. Schools were completely segregated; in fact the races were completely segregated everywhere, with separate drinking fountains and bathrooms in public places, though I saw very few of those, since none of us kids ever went anywhere. Negroes (as they were called in polite terms) weren't allowed to eat in restaurants, or at soda fountains and the like. They could purchase items, but weren't allowed to sit on the stools at the counter. Segregation permeated every aspect of life. Even obituaries in the newspapers were white only!

The schools were supposed to be "separate but equal" but that was a monstrous lie on the part of every politician responsible for funding schools in the South. They were no more equal than a kitten is equal to a tiger. Once Gary and I were exploring in the woods and we found the elementary school where Negroes in our area were taught. We found a way to get inside and curious, as kids will be, we took the opportunity. It was a one-room building, heated with a wood stove. No bathroom like our schools, just an outhouse. The school books were so tattered and worn they looked like trash and nothing else. Lunches must have been prepared in that room for there was a pantry with big tins of peanut butter and others of beans and peas. That was about it. The desks were misshapen and battered to the point they should have been used for firewood. All the grades must have been taught in that one room because we found books for several different grades. In short, compared to our school, it was pitiful. It's amazing to me that so many blacks managed an education at all in those days.

What was so terrible about the educational system was that even a Negro with a college degree had very little opportunity in the South, other than as a doctor (treating only blacks) or lawyer (handling only black affairs). Otherwise, the jobs open to them were garbage collectors, physical laborers (but not in the skilled trades like carpenter or bricklayer; those were reserved for whites), janitors, maids, cooks (but never the lead cook in any restaurant of note), dishwashers and so forth. In short, Negroes were relegated to the menial jobs and that was all they were allowed to have.

Beginning in the fourth or possibly fifth grade, I began working in the school cafeteria for my meals, which would have cost 15 cents otherwise, money we simply didn't have. Up until then we brought our lunch like the other poor kids, but I think we were one of the few who brought biscuits and salt pork rather than sandwiches, or sometimes an odd combination of sugar and butter on biscuits. Sugar was cheaper than jelly and store bread was too costly. By the way, I still like a hot buttered biscuit with sugar! Working in the cafeteria meant I had to skip the lunch break and didn't get to play with the other kids. I can't remember it bothering me; it was just a fact of life that me and three or four other kids worked for our meals.

This would never be possible today; the schools would be too scared of getting sued if the least little accident happened, but back then people didn't sue like they do today, at the drop of a hat. Besides, I'm sure some school psychologist would insist that doing such a thing as working for meals would hurt the kids' psychological development, making them feel inferior or some such psychobabble. Personally, I think it helped me develop a work ethic. I certainly knew what I was working for, and felt I was well paid with the full cafeteria meals!

One of my most notable memories is of Dad selling our milk cow to pay some debts. The cow was the only legacy of the dairy farm which moved with us, and the only important one so far as I was concerned, and my siblings as well. We all loved milk and had it for every meal. A couple of days after the cow had been sold, Dad brought home cans of evaporated milk and insisted that when diluted with water, it tasted just as good as fresh cow milk. He was singularly unconvincing. None of us could abide the taste of evaporated milk and we refused to drink it no matter how much we were threatened and cajoled. Within a week or two he gave up and we had either water or tea with meals. Mother bought powdered milk and mixed it to cook with. When sugar was available she added it to the mix and made it drinkable.

We lived in one house for a few months, then finances deteriorated even further. We had to move and this time it was up the road a couple of hundred yards, on the other side of the railroad tracks, into a truly decrepit old place. It did have electric lights, bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling on cords, but that was the only purpose the electricity served. There was no money for appliances. Mother was given a new wood burning kitchen stove to cook on and somehow we came by an old wringer type washing machine. That was the extent of the amenities. There was the usual outhouse which we all hated to use, having gotten a brief touch of a bathroom in the previous house. Besides the kitchen stove, there was one wood burning stove to heat the whole house with. It must have been horribly cold during the winter with the thin walls, bereft of insulation, but I don't remember ever being that cold. Mother was the one who got up each morning and got the fires going.

I do remember playing in the woods a lot. There was a stream we explored for several miles back into the forest and lots of interesting things to do around the railroad tracks. Mother would have fainted had she seen Gary and me walk across a long railroad trestle with a drop of 50 or 60 feet beneath it and no way to escape had a train come along while we were playing on it. We were very lucky!

We made "caves" of the stacked railroad ties by moving them around. I still have fond memories of standing close to the tracks and watching a coal burning steam engine approaching, huge amounts of dark oily smoke billowing up and trailing behind and the long, deep wail of the whistle, warning motorists of its approach, then roaring and clanking past like a modern-day dinosaur, the wind of its passing blowing dust and grit onto our bare skin and into our hair and eyes. We made a game of how close we would stand to the tracks when the train came by, and probably scared the engineers half to death.

I began drinking coffee when I was seven and had my appendix out, which happened while we were still living in Keithville. In those days, the rule was bed rest in the hospital for at least a week after surgery. My diet the first few days was a choice of water, tea or coffee. That's when I learned to like coffee, just for a change, and I've loved it ever since. My doctor tells me one of the possible causes of my recent bout with internal bleeding was excessive coffee drinking. And as I remember, coffee and cigarettes were the two things we always had money for. However, toward the end of Mother and Dad's marriage, the cigarettes were rolled from loose tobacco on a little gadget. We kids thought it was fun to roll the cigarettes for Mother and Dad and made a game of it. Gary and I sometimes filched a couple and learned to smoke, though without inhaling.

My cousin Jerry usually came to visit every summer. Me, Jerry and Gary formed a club. We called it "The Confederate Club." Jerry was a captain, I was a lieutenant and Gary was a sergeant. We didn't have any privates. We were very serious with our club and continued it off and on for years. Later on when I had a little allowance, Gary and I sent a few pennies each month as "dues" until we discovered the captain had used the money for a model airplane. At a family reunion 50 years later, we inducted Jerry's father into the club, promoted everyone to general, then disbanded. It was great fun.

Our fifth grade teacher is one I'll always remember. During the year, each day she would read us a segment of "Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain. I think now, by the fifth grade, there's no time for such foolishness. Kids are too busy studying for those tests mandated by the government. I've often wondered how many readers that teacher created by reading aloud in class. Of course today, it would be impossible to read that book aloud in school. Too much mention of race, and so much casual use of the word "nigger." But how many kids miss out on real history by policies like that? Mark Twain wrote about times and events from the era honestly and I doubt he intended to give offense to anyone. Like most authors, I believe he was simply trying to tell a good story.

All in all, I found myself increasingly living in my imagination during that era, doing things I thought gave me an aura of importance, like making up an imaginary language no one else knew. I fooled my brothers and sisters for years with it. My fantasies were mostly about having lots of money one day so I could do some of the things I read about in books.

There were no Boy or Girl Scouts or Cubs and Brownies, or perhaps there were but none of us belonged to them that I remember. Probably it was a matter of transportation not being available, if there were clubs in the area. Or maybe Mother was ashamed that she couldn't afford even the small amount of money needed to attend or be a member of activities like that. We had no organized after school activities at all. Again, there probably were some, but we didn't go, again for lack of transportation, I think, or more likely there was some money required and we simply had no money.

I realized we were poor, of course, and I'm sure my two older sisters knew it even more, but I didn't have any idea of how desperately Mother was struggling to keep five kids fed (and six the last year). It wasn't that Dad didn't make enough money. A railroad man made good wages for the time, but he gambled and drank away his salary. In later years Mother told me that several times she had to put us to bed without supper and that we cried because we were hungry—and she said she went to bed and cried, too, because Dad was out somewhere drinking and gambling and losing his paycheck.

The last year or two must also have been desperate on Mother's part. After I was grown, she told me at one of our early morning sessions at the kitchen table that the last couple of years she and Dad lived together she feared for her life. I have no reason to doubt it. One day we came home from school and saw a hole had been blown in one wall by the shotgun. Mother told us it had gone off accidentally but even today I can remember the look on her face. I think there must have been a struggle for the gun and it went off then. Or perhaps Dad simply fired it to scare her into staying with him. On another occasion I came home from school a little early and met Mother and Dad dressed in hunting clothes going the other way. It was so unusual to see Mother with him like that it caused me to ask where they were going. When Dad said they were going hunting I asked if I could go. Dad said no, that Mother never got a chance to go with him and for me to go on home. I can't say now, but I think perhaps the sight of me changed Dad's mind about killing Mother and himself.

There's something I forgot to mention which occurred during the time we were living in Keithville, when I must have been about five or six. We were visiting my great aunt in Shreveport, a rare occasion, and for some reason I suddenly began wondering where everything came from. I asked my aunt where all the houses I could see came from. She said God made them and everything else. When I asked when and how God made them, she backtracked and said God made men and men made the houses. That satisfied me for a while, until one day when I was, oh, maybe eight years old or so, I was outside and suddenly remembered that occasion. I started thinking about it and began wondering: If God made everything, where did God come from? I couldn't figure it out then and I've never been able to resolve the question since. Actually, I don't think anyone else has either, philosophers and preachers notwithstanding.

Every Christmas and Thanksgiving after we moved to that falling-down old house, a big car or truck would pull up and representatives from the local churches and charities would unload boxes and baskets of food for us, knowing we were one of the poorest families in the district (well, the Negro population was almost certainly poorer, but no one worried about them, to my knowledge, though I suppose they had their own charities). As I've remarked, in the South of that era, the two races may as well have been separate species, with whites the dominant one. Mother was terribly embarrassed at having to accept charity as she told me later, but she overcame it by the thought that the kids would get some good food and a change from the habitual salt pork, biscuits, beans and oatmeal.

In the sixth grade I had my first contact with someone who was truly foreign. A couple of kids from Europe, probably refugees from WWII, appeared in our class. They spoke not a word of English but were sent to school anyway. Before long, they assimilated the language simply by playing and talking with the school kids. We would point out things and give the English name for it and they would faithfully repeat it. Sometimes we were kind of casually cruel in the way kids will be, and introduced them to words like stinkpot and stupid and so forth. I don't remember any of us kids cursing in grade school. Now it seems they start learning foul language in kindergarten. At any rate, the foreign kids soon learned English and caught up in school, helped I'm sure by their parents at home who wanted them to fit in with America as soon as possible. Instances like that make me even more certain today that the idea of second language instruction in school is wrong. If we want immigrants to assimilate, leave it to the kids; they'll take care of it, with some help from their parents, and perhaps some heavy after school instruction in English to hurry the process. I'm speaking of legal immigrants, of course. Hell, even illegal immigrants would benefit, since we're being forced to educate them anyway. Maybe that would hurry them on their kids into wanting to become legal.

I'd like to mention my sixth grade teacher here. She was also the principal of the elementary school, something that would be impossible today. There's too much paper shuffling to do. I don't think she even had a secretary. Maybe some of the sixth grade girls helped but I'm not even sure about that. I do remember she had a fearsome reputation until I actually arrived at the sixth grade and found that she was simply interested in teaching us as well as she could in that country school. I think I learned more in that half year before we left Shreveport than I did for a long time to come. And years later, when I was in my 50s I got back in contact with her. We wrote each other for a while. She was in her 80s then but still had very good handwriting and wrote interesting letters. She was of the old school, though. She wrote me that she had retired when they started "mixing the races" and took some of her best staff to teach at newly integrated schools.

And here I'm going to insert one of my own beliefs about the way desegregation was carried out. I think it should have begun one year with the first grade only integrated, then continued to advance a year for each school year, so that twelve years later we would have had a generation who didn't go through the trauma of bussing, rioting, and so forth. I can't prove it would have gone easier like that but I believe a gradual process would have worked much better than the way it happened.

Dad sold Tracks, our phenomenal squirrel dog and beloved pet, along about then, again to pay debts run up from gambling and drinking. He got the tremendous sum of $50, equivalent today to around a thousand dollars, at least. Someone who really liked to squirrel hunt must have bought him!

I was so quick in school that I never developed good study habits, a situation which was to plague me later on in life. And Mother, of course, had little time to supervise our studies. All of us kids made exceptionally good grades and she left it at that, and we seldom saw Dad. When not working, he spent time in bars, and hunting, fishing and trapping in season. We did get different kinds of meat than salt pork from his hunting, especially squirrels in season, rabbits any time, and there was another kind of meat we enjoyed, frog legs. Occasionally Dad would go frog gigging and bring home a bushel basket of huge bull frogs. It was us kids who cleaned them, a sort of onerous job but not too difficult once we got the hang of it. Mother hated to cook them, because fresh frog legs frequently jumped around in the pan while being fried. They were very good, though, and a welcome change in diet. I still like them today, but it's gotten to where you can no longer find them, what with the decline of the species.

Occasionally when Dad would really need money immediately, he would go out at night and hunt rabbits illegally with a spotlight. He would come in the next morning with twenty or thirty rabbits, skin them out and take them into the "nigger section" of town in Shreveport to sell, for anywhere from 75 cents to $1.25 per rabbit. I went with him once and for the first time saw how Negroes lived back then in towns. They were worse off than us. Little did I know that a few years later, we kids and Mother would be living in an old house adjoining the section and I would throw a paper route there. Even more ironically, much later in life, Mother would return to the exact location of the old falling-down house we'd lived in, where a nursing home was built after the house was torn down. She lived some of her last years in that nursing home. She thought it was a strange turn of events and I guess it was.

Discipline when we misbehaved was with a switch by Mother, a belt by Dad. We didn't get whipped that often, so I guess on the whole we were pretty well behaved. Gary and I once got a real whaling though, when Dad invested some money in a purebred hound bitch he intended to breed, to make some money selling the pups. He told us to tie the dog up when she came into heat. We did, with an old silk hose like women wore back then. The bitch promptly chewed through it and ran off and wound up having a litter of mongrels. As we were taking our whipping, I remember how outraged I felt, especially since I only vaguely understood why Dad was so mad. There had been no rope to tie the dog up with and we had done the best we could, yet still got punished.

I've talked about Gary a lot. He is two years younger than me, so naturally I was the leader in our endeavors as kids. We fought sometimes. I always won, but barely, since Gary was built heavier than me and almost as big as me. We were frequently taken for twins when we dressed in the same feed sack shirts. Just recently, Gary told me that he has always sort of looked up to me. That came as kind of a shock to me. I never realized it; in fact, I had always been a little jealous of him because of his bigger build and not being quite as bashful as me. Once we both left home we became the best of friends and have remained amazingly close ever afterward. It's nice to have a good brother who is also your best friend.

Bashful. That was something that plagued me all through school and later on in life. I was painfully shy. The least little thing embarrassed me. Along about eleven I became aware of girls as a separate species, but an attractive girl would scare me silly, and for the life of me I couldn't initiate a normal conversation with girls, especially pretty ones. The whole thing might have been easier to bear had I known then that there was such a thing as a "bashful gene," recently discovered, but of course I didn't. Being so bashful changed my life in a way I wouldn't have anticipated, because I found out in my teen years that with a few drinks under my belt I could overcome some of the bashful trait. It was such a relief that the drinking progressed, but that's for a later part of this memoir.

We didn't go to church every Sunday, but did occasionally. I know now that the reason for our infrequent attendance was because Mother was ashamed of our poor clothes and of the lack of money to drop into the collection plate. A few times at church I would invite one of the boys to come home with me and stay overnight and go back to school with me the next morning. I don't remember any of them coming back for a second time. I guess outhouses, salt pork and biscuits, no games of any kind, and no radio or things like that were too foreign for them tolerate more than once.

The last year we lived in that old house, Mother became pregnant again, producing a baby sister. She was unplanned, of course. All of the rest of us came at two-year intervals, but Jackie was six years younger than Michael, who had been the youngest until then. Now there were six kids at home. Grandma Bain, Dad's mother, came and stayed with us for a few months around that time. She was a really sweet woman and loved everyone. She was rather obsessed with religion but she didn't try to impress it on anyone else. All of us kids, and Mother too, loved Grandma Bain. She had raised nine kids and spent a lifetime of work but so far as I know, she never complained to anyone. She was a fabulous cook, too. She made small little pancakes that were delicious and I've still never eaten a better apple pie than she made.

Dad had a 16-gauge pump shotgun handed down to him from his Dad. It was manufactured in 1895 and it was a beautiful gun. For years, Dad had been promising that it would be mine when he died or was too old to hunt, then one day he announced he had sold it, with no apology at all. Same thing; gambling and drinking. I was heartbroken. He had also bought me a single shot .22 rifle on my eleventh birthday. One time he took it hunting (to use for squirrels) and came back without it. He claimed he had forgotten and left it leaning against a tree. Even then, I knew he drank a lot and gambled, and I suspected he had sold it or lost it in a card game, but I can't say for sure. His story might have been the truth, but I doubt it.

All this time, none of us kids had much more than an inkling that things were not good between Mother and Dad. They kept their quarrels private. I think I was the only one of us who knew much at all, and that was because I came home from school one day with an irritated eye and they were arguing about a divorce. Mother and Dad both asked me who I wanted to go with if they did split up. It was a terrible question to put to an 11-year-old boy out of the blue. I didn't know what to say. Finally I thought of a compromise. "I'll stay with Mother until school is out, then go with Daddy," I said, an attempt to please them both. The subject was dropped for a little while and I never told any of my brothers or sisters about the incident, but the specter of the family splitting up was looming ever closer.

I should note here that readers may have gotten the impression that Dad didn't love us. It wasn't that at all. I'm sure he did love us; it was just that the demons of drinking and gambling had their hooks in him more and more as time went on. And there's another factor. He hadn't been raised in a home where overt demonstrations of love were common as in most families, and thus brought the lack into his own family. I can't say that for sure, but I do know that hugs or expression of affection were rare for us kids.

Two of my most memorable occurrences in grade school were field trips. One was to a Wonder Bread bakery. It was wonderful and amazing to see how the bread was made without human intervention, other than to maintain the machinery. Another was to a weather station. There was one more excursion, but that wasn't such a happy one.

The fifth grade was to put on a radio play for a local station. Part of the play involved group singing. Our teacher quickly learned that I was tone deaf and couldn't carry a tune. I was politely asked to remain silent during the singing and during practice I did, simply mouthing the words to myself. Alas, during the actual performance at the radio station, I forgot and began singing. I got way off base from the rest of the group, my voice rising over theirs in what amounted to structured screaming (or more likely unstructured screaming). I was having a fine time when I noticed the teacher glaring at me, her face a fiery red, and I suddenly remembered I wasn't supposed to be singing. She never disciplined me for that breach. I suppose she thought once the damage was done, the less said the better. That story is related in one of my Santa Claus Lane books, either Life On Santa Claus Lane or Laughing All The Way. I forget which right now.

I was too bashful to volunteer for any of the school plays or projects and anyway, the good parts always went to the rich kids and popular ones without regard to talent (or so it seems to me when looking back). Besides, most of the good parts required expensive costumes the actors had to buy and I knew without asking that we couldn't afford them, even if I had gotten up the nerve to try out for a part. I didn't resent this; it was simply a fact of life and I knew it.

I think I was in the fifth grade when I met my first amateur writer, a friend of Carla, my next oldest sister. A friend of hers came and spent the night once and I was amazed to learn that she was writing a book—in longhand, of course, and in a spiral notebook. I was allowed to read a few pages of it and best as I remember, wasn't overly impressed. Perhaps it just wasn't my type of book, or perhaps it was that a seventh grade girl wasn't quite up to the writing standards I was used to. It must have made some impression though, for I remember it very clearly today, and I imitated her later on, doing my own writing in a spiral notebook. At first I used cursive writing, but after a time I began to print simply because it resembled a "real" book more. All this came later though.

Christmas of 1950 was terrible. The usual charity boxes and baskets had been delivered and we kids were looking forward to Christmas morning and having some new clothes and a little candy and oranges and things we never got otherwise. But then Christmas morning arrived and Mother was nowhere around. She had left. My two oldest sisters knew what had happened but they weren't saying. I finally cornered Snooky, the oldest, while she was crying and demanded to know what had happened. She told me, "Mother's run off with Jim."

Jim was a fellow Dad brought home occasionally, a drinking buddy, but a nice guy anyway. I didn't know it until Mother told me years later, but by that time she was in fear of her life. She wanted to leave but said Dad threatened to kill her if she did. The situation had deteriorated to the point where frequently she had trouble finding anything at all for the kids to eat. Dad was coming home less and less, sometimes staying gone for two or three days at a time, gambling away his paychecks, and I guess she finally figured she had to do something, because the situation couldn't have gotten much worse. Jim offered her sanctuary and she took it, though no sexual association occurred then. He was simply helping out in a situation which had careened completely out of control.

I had no idea what to do. The fact that Mother had left had a terrible impact on me. For the next two days I would periodically take a blanket out to the pasture behind the house and lay on it and cry and cry. I don't remember talking to any of the other kids about the situation. Dad was sick in bed with an infected arm, which probably gave Mother an opportunity to escape so maintaining the household the next several days fell to Snooky and Carla. Some well-meaning preachers came by and said prayers. One of them had the audacity to announce that Mother was simply trying to scare Dad into behaving. He predicted Mother would return within twenty-four hours. He said all this without having a clue as to the real circumstances. She didn't return, of course, but my Uncle T.C. did come down and help locate Mother. I can't remember whether it was T.C. or one of our neighbors who helped some of us kids to get to Arkansas and under the care of Grandmother Masters, my uncle's mother, but that's where we all went first.

In those days, a woman running off put her in the wrong, no matter what the circumstances, so the way it wound up was that Dad got to keep custody of us all but couldn't just yet because of his illness. Mother went to Oklahoma to stay with a sister, taking the two youngest, Michael and Jackie, the new baby sister, with her. Snooky, Carla, Gary and I went to Arkansas to stay with Grandmother, while Dad left Shreveport and moved to Fort Worth, Texas.

There followed an odyssey for the kids, especially Gary and me, for the next two or three years. I'll continue with that part of my life in the next segment, where I made a decision which almost certainly had a greatly positive effect on mine and Gary's lives, a decision no 13-year-old child should ever have to make. I did it, though. Without a doubt, it was the bravest thing I've ever done in my life.

Part Four

This part of my life covers the period from 1950, when the family broke up, until 1953, when five of us kids were back with Mother in Shreveport. It was an odyssey, with me attending eight different schools during that period of moves and being switched from one custody to another. My brother Gary was with me all the time, and some of my other siblings were with me part of the time. It was traumatic but had its good moments.

The breakup of Mother and Dad's marriage was on Christmas Day of 1950, the year I was eleven years old. I cried and cried, because for all I knew, Mother had indeed run off with Jim, leaving us six kids home with Dad while he was sick in bed. I learned later that Mother simply took an opportunity to leave when she had it, fearing for her life, as she told me later.

Several days passed, with constant agonizing over where Mother was. Religious leaders of the community came to the house, offering prayers for her return. Such an event was a scandal in our little community. The prayers did no good, nor did anything else. I can't recall all the details of what went on, other than it seemed like I was crying most of the time, thinking Mother was gone forever.

After several days, our neighbor (I think) took us kids to Arkansas to stay with Grandmother. Then someone else took the two youngest, Michael and Jackie, to Oklahoma to live with Mother, where she had sought refuge with her sister's family while trying to get her life in order. Mother also started work there, having to lie about her experience as a waitress in order to find a job. She got away with it somehow.

The four of us in Arkansas with Grandmother – my older sisters Snooky and Carla, and Gary and I – began school in Mena, a little town of about 4,000. It took a while to adjust, but eventually we all did, or as well as we could. Neither Gary nor I ever talked about our situation at school. Somehow it felt as if it was something to be ashamed of.

Gary and I spent a lot of our time over at our cousin Jerry's house. We probably drove Uncle T.C. and Aunt Helen almost to the wall with our constant presence when not in school, but they did what they could for us and I'll always remember it and be grateful. They were wonderful then and still are now. In fact, I sort of took Uncle T.C. for a father figure simply because he was such a good person and was never too busy to pay attention to us, even though at the time he was struggling to make a living and had five kids at home himself. I remember being amazed at seeing him change the baby's diaper, something Dad had never done, or at least if he had I never saw it.

We also got to spend some time with Grandma Bain, our other grandma, whom we loved, but who would be a long time forgiving Mother for leaving Dad, simply because she didn't know the whole story. Actually, I guess Mother and Dad are the only two who knew it all and neither of them talked much about it then or later. I'll always be grateful that neither of them ever said anything bad about the other until long after we were grown, and even then it wasn't much. Dad admitted once that drinking drove Mother away and that there were "other issues." Mother told me after I was grown that drinking and gambling killed the love she once had for him and that he threatened a number of times to kill her if she left, which was why she had to do it the way she did. That's really all I know, other than that I know for sure that Dad's drinking and gambling beggared us.

The school in Mena was quite different than the one in Summer Grove. I had a hard time adjusting, especially since I was becoming more and more aware of girls, yet still carried that awful bashful trait with me. I simply couldn't talk to a girl in other than neutral circumstances. Yet I daydreamed about them a lot, especially the pretty ones.

One day when I had already finished my lesson, as usual way ahead of the others in my class, I started doodling on a sheet of paper, writing down the names of all the girls in the class I thought were reasonably pretty. Some boy found the paper and then it found its way into the teacher's hands, who then assumed it was a note I was passing, despite my adamant denials. I was taken to her office for a thorough paddling. The stories I'd heard was that you got paddled until you cried. I gritted my teeth and refused to utter a sound, all the while thinking of the injustice of what was happening to me. Finally, the teacher's arm got tired, I guess, because the paddling ceased. Later on, I got a lot of teasing from the guys and some angry words from the girls. The whole thing was terribly embarrassing.

Gary and I lived with Grandmother for about three months, where I had my first ice cream cone and saw a couple of movies, including Bambi. Grandmother Masters worked in a department store during the day. She was rather distant but took extremely good care of us. She bought us new clothes, made lunch for us to carry to school each day, and to my knowledge never assigned any household chores to us.

Gary and I were hired for our first job while living with Grandmother. We helped a plumber dig a new septic system. He paid me 35 cents an hour and Gary 25 cents an hour. I can't remember what we did with our paychecks. Mine came to about $13, I think. Each of us bought a single shot BB gun for $1.98. Probably we wasted the rest of the money on candy and other sweets which we didn't get much of. Grandmother didn't cook a lot and I don't remember her ever making a dessert. She did make us each buy a pair of blue jeans, come to think of it. Back then jeans came with a rectangular piece of leather on the back of the belt line that you could have engraved with a heating iron. Since I had always been called "Sonny," that's what I had put on mine—and the kids at school promptly started calling me "Sonny Boy." That's the last time I ever let any one call me that.

Besides Bambi, we saw another movie, When Worlds Collide. The movie, and the idea, fascinated me so much that I wrote a little story about gangs of desperate men trying to capture the last space ship leaving Earth. I guess that was my first real story. My cousin Jerry illustrated it for me. He had a real artistic talent and later made his living at commercial art. I guess we both were already reaching for the profession we each loved, but it would take me far longer to get there than him.

I also read my first science fiction novel then. It impressed me so much I tended to read and love to write science fiction the rest of my life, although that's certainly not the only genre I read or write in.

After three months in Mena, Mother sent for us. We moved to Oklahoma and I began another new school. Mother was getting herself established but still living with her sister.

Gary and I started school there. It was a very unhappy experience for me, even though I was in school with one of my other favorite cousins, Larry. The problem was that all the boys in the sixth grade seemed to want to do was fight and see how tough they were, while I wanted to read all the books in the small library first thing. I usually spent recess and lunch hour reading since we weren't allowed to take the books home, but inevitably, I would be taunted until I couldn't stand it any more and had to go outside and fight.

Fighting wasn't anything I detested or was afraid of; it was simply that there were more interesting things to do. Like any other country boy, I had been in scraps before, but never had I seen an environment like this one, where the boys wanted to fight all the time, for no reason at all that I could see, other than to find out who could whip who. It seemed absolutely crazy to me. All the fighting I had ever done, a very limited amount, had been over some issue or another, forgotten now, but certainly not just to see who could whip who.

Over the course of a week or so I managed to whip all but two of the boys, but the so-called "toughest boy in school" still wouldn't leave me alone. Probably that had a lot to do with the fact that the prettiest girl in the class was showing an interest in me (and I was too bashful to talk to her) and that he was such a braggart I couldn't let it stand when he made such wild claims as that he could whip any five boys at the same time. When I called him on it and tried to get some other guys to prove him wrong and shut him up, no one would stand with me. He really had the other boys buffaloed. Eventually, it got to the point where Clarence, the tough guy's name, said he was going to knife fight me. I was horrified at the mere suggestion, knowing what that could cause, and I flat out refused. It wasn't fear; it was just knowing that it was something I shouldn't do. Then he threatened to catch me after school and do dire things to me. I don't know what would have happened eventually, but I don't think I would have run. I certainly wasn't a sissy even though I got called that sometimes because of loving books so much. Anyway, I never learned what might have happened because Dad appeared on the scene when we had only been in Oklahoma for two or three weeks.

Dad had been working in Fort Worth, still for a railroad. He had gotten well and had stopped drinking. He took me and Gary and Mike and Jackie all back to Fort Worth. Mother could do nothing at all about it because the courts had given him custody of all of us kids. I don't remember much except the hugs when we left, but I know it must have broken Mother's heart.

It was a strange two years that followed. First there was another school, my fourth that year. Then there was living in a city rather than the country. And finally, there was the atmosphere, living in a slum close to the railroad tracks and having strange women care for us, after a fashion, while Dad worked. He established a charge account for us at the local Mom and Pop store, the type that occupied practically every corner back in those days. They sold groceries, mostly, but a sprinkling of other things. It was like a cornucopia for Gary and me. We could have anything in the store we wanted, and there followed a number of months where we lived mostly on candy and cookies. You can just picture 12- and 10-year-old boys who had never had much of anything other than staples being able to buy anything in the store. We went hog wild.

The women who cared for us, sort of, weren't anything like Mother. I didn't care for either of them, especially after Dad started sleeping with one of them, an ugly old harridan to my young eyes, and especially compared to Mother's beauty. Gary and I were mostly unsupervised, even to taking baths and getting haircuts or knowing when we needed new clothes and so forth, and Dad was little help, having never done anything like care for kids. He tried but he was completely out of his element, and spending time with the bottle certainly didn't help after he started drinking again. Once after Mike finally did get a haircut, we could see dirt crusted on his head. On the other hand, the lack of regular haircuts would ultimately prove to be mine and Gary's salvation, which I'll relate a little later on.

Gary and I found an Army Surplus Store. This was back when those stores were filled with goods from WWII. We bought all kinds of camping equipment, machetes, bayonets, canteens and so forth, then began spending time along the Trinity River, camping out sometimes. We bought all kinds of fishing supplies, too, and found a good way to get to the Trinity River by walking over a bridge spanning the railroad tracks, or in dry weather, taking a shortcut through a long culvert that ran beneath.

After that we spent a good deal of time playing around the river, learning to swim by ourselves in the process. We also put ourselves in great danger without even knowing it. Bums, hobos, drifters, itinerant preachers, criminals, unemployed single men and all kinds of men from the very lowest strata of society also hung around that portion of the river. Gary and I saw nothing wrong with making friends with them, talking and swimming with them and using our charge account to buy food (mostly candy and cookies and cakes) for them. It is a pure wonder that one or both of us weren't molested—or worse.

Our unsupervised lifestyle went on for a few months, then Dad saw that he simply couldn't handle the two youngest of us, Mike and Jackie, especially after he started drinking and gambling again. His abstinence had only lasted a couple of months. Mother came and got Mike and Jackie. She also cleaned the house. I hadn't realized the kind of filth and clutter we were living in until she began sweeping it all out. She left us with a hug and tears in her eyes because she couldn't take us too.

Now then, back to the haircuts and how the lack of them changed our lives. I was in the seventh grade, and Gary was in the fifth, at a different school, of course. His teacher was doing vocabulary practice with the kids one day and asked one of them to use the term wealth in a sentence. The boy pointed to Gary and said, "Gary has a wealth of hair." Gary told me how embarrassed he had been, but it also drew the teacher's attention to him.

The teacher's name was Becky. She had been operated on for some sort of female illness as a young lady and was childless and could never have a child. She was married to a man studying to be a minister, in his last year of Divinity school, I think. His name was Steve. At any rate he was far enough along in his studies to be practicing preaching. Becky somehow checked into Gary's status, and found he had a brother, me. From there, Steve and Becky asked Dad if Gary and I could come live with them "for a while." Dad agreed. I have no idea why, after all the trouble he went to taking us away from Mother, but that's the way it happened. Within a week or two, we were living in a whole new environment, one totally different than anything we had ever known.

Steve and Becky bought us new clothes, got us haircuts and generally had us all clean and refurbished within a week. We also entered a structured environment unlike the one we had been in where we were almost totally unsupervised by anyone. We went to church on Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening. That was a bit much for me, but not all that bothersome. For one thing I knew that Sunday after church we would go to a cafeteria to eat. This was an awesome event to me the first few times, where you could choose all those things to eat and lots and lots of people were there and Becky and Steve pretty well let us choose what we wanted. I still remember the name of the place, The Colonial Cafeteria.

The school year ended and we were sent to a church camp. I have to say I did enjoy that experience. For one thing, the eggs were scrambled without milk. Before then, every morning Becky made the same thing for breakfast: milk, juice, eggs scrambled with milk and cinnamon toast that was more cinnamon than sugar. I had gotten to the point where I could barely abide the taste of eggs, then lo and behold, the taste at camp was entirely different. These were scrambled without milk, in bacon grease, and tasted ambrosial to me.

There were sports and crafts and Bible classes all the time. I was a good student and excelled at those, but didn't do too well at sports, being a little small for my age. Gary, on the other hand, won almost all the competitions for his age since he was big for his age. In fact, he was always so nearly my size that we were frequently taken for twins until our late teens when he finally outgrew me.

We only saw Dad a few hours maybe once a month when he came to Steve and Becky's house to visit. He would attempt to play some ball or other games with us but really had no idea how to go about it. When we went to spend a day with him, we stayed in the bar and grill with him almost all the time. He drank beer and Gary and I played one of the machines common to bars then, either a "shoot the bear" sort of thing or a type of electronic shuffleboard.

The summer passed. I can't say I was really unhappy, but I did miss the unfettered life style of before. During the time we lived with Becky and Steve I began trying to write books, always science fiction and always following the plot of one I had read before, usually Heinlein. They certainly weren't good books, and I don't think I ever finished one, but I did spend lots of time writing and not much time studying. My writing was filled with fighting and violence, such as colonists on Venus fighting against the inhabitants there or suchlike. I don't think Steve and Becky knew quite what to think of my literary endeavors. I think they would have preferred me to spend more time studying, because even that early I was beginning to lose interest in school subjects. I didn't like to study. I would much rather read.

Then came the first crisis.

Becky and Steve approached Dad about adopting us. That was going too far and Dad flatly refused and took us back. We had already started school and both of us had to change schools again. Changing schools was old hat by now, though. It hardly ruffled our feathers. Dad had moved away from the previous place near the railroad tracks so we didn't get to play along the river unless we took a long trolley ride. On the other hand, we lived near a skid row area of town, a fascinating place for young boys. Again, it's a wonder we didn't get molested or attacked because we wandered all over the area on weekends with no fear at all. In fact, we couldn't even imagine anyone bothering us.

Dad remarried, but it lasted only about a month. I've even forgotten the woman's name, but I do remember the last thing she said to me. "I think your Dad married me just to have someone to take care of you boys." I suspect there was a lot of truth in that statement.

While Dad was married, Gary and I went back to another school, this one in a different part of town. We had another charge account but this one was limited. We wandered around the skid row part of town, unsupervised, spending what money we had in penny arcades and shooting galleries and getting rather odd looks from proprietors and the regular inhabitants of that section of town. Again, it's fortunate that we escaped molestation, or worse.

Dad got into a fight and was hospitalized for several days. By this time he was living with a young woman and she took fairly good care of us. Still, I was unhappy. It seemed to me that there had to be more to life than going to school and coming back and spending time in a hot, rundown duplex or in the bar with Daddy or down on skid row with the bums and alcoholics. We weren't allowed in the bar and grill at night without Daddy, only during the day. I don't know why; perhaps the proprietor knew the men got very rowdy at night—which was when Dad got into the fight. It was a lonely life for me, and I'm sure for Gary as well, though we didn't talk about it. There weren't even many books to read, but I did find one of Heinlein's early books in an old pile of junk and the school library had a couple of his young adult books which I loved.

While living with Dad I had actually found a couple of girls I liked that I was actually able to talk to, but that was all. I was still scared to do much else. I did have an idea that girls liked jewelry so one Saturday I left Gary at home and went to town, still in the skid row area, but I did find a jewelry store. I saw a gold bracelet with a gold heart attached to it, probably 14 carat, but it was pretty. It didn't have a price tag. I pulled out all of my money, $1.25, and told the man I wanted to buy the bracelet. He started to say something, then gave me a sympathetic and slightly amused look. He let me have the bracelet for that price, although I'm sure it cost at least three times that much. He was a nice man and I'm sure he got a chuckle out of a little boy buying jewelry for his girlfriend. The girl accepted it and said thanks but she already had her eye on older boys so I might as well have saved my money.

Whether it was the influence of the religious indoctrination by Becky and Steve, missing Mother, or some other factor I can't remember, I decided something had to change. I was barely 13 at the time when I made a momentous decision. One day we were in the bar and grill while Dad was working. I had been thinking about our situation for days at the time and finally came to a conclusion. I said to Gary "I don't know about you, but I don't want to live like this any more." He knew what I meant and agreed, as at that age he normally agreed with just about anything I said or did. I went and called Steve and Becky and told them the same thing. To repeat what I said earlier, I think it's the bravest thing I ever did. At 13, it's not easy to stand up to your Dad and, in effect, tell him you didn't like the way he was raising you and that you intended to do something drastic about it.

Daddy was at work and Steve and Becky came out and got us. We missed school for a couple of days. When the teacher asked me for an excuse, I had one written by Becky. The teacher asked me to read it aloud. I stood up and said I didn't want to read it but I would show it to her. She told me to either read it aloud or go see the principal. Even at that young age, I knew right from wrong, and being forced to read family troubles in class went against my grain. I walked out and went to the principal, and showed him the note and he, of course, agreed with me. About two seconds later the teacher was in his office, behind closed doors. I have no idea what the principal said to her but he must have carved her up into little pieces because all the way back to class she kept asking me to forgive her. I said I did, but really, I didn't. I thought she was just saying that because the principal had scared the holy bejesus out of her.

A few days later we appeared in court. Daddy was there, but he had nothing to say to us. Becky and Steve were there and were granted temporary custody. On the drive back to their house, Steve stopped the car for a talk. He asked us what we really wanted to do. Did we want to stay with them? I didn't really know at that point. I had made a decision and now didn't know what to do next. In a very small voice, and because they had been so good to us I couldn't bear to hurt their feelings, I said I would stay with them, but it wasn't really what I wanted. I didn't know what I wanted, not only for me but for Gary, too, as I felt somewhat protective of him, and I had gotten him into the present situation. Steve put his finger on the problem within a few seconds. He said "I think what you both really want to do is go live with your mother, isn't it?" Gary and I both said yes immediately, and silently I thanked Steve for being so perceptive. My voice was much louder that time as I realized suddenly how much I missed Mother and wanted to be with the rest of my brothers and sisters. As I learned later, Mother wouldn't have agreed to an adoption by Becky and Steve anyway. Steve had called her and while she had a chance she was already planning on going to court if necessary to get us back.

A few days later Steve and Becky drove us to Shreveport, only a few miles from where the odyssey had begun almost three years earlier. Mother had moved back from Oklahoma and was working as a waitress, supporting Carla and Jackie and Mike. Now she had Gary and me as well, five children, with no support money. So far as I know Daddy never paid any at all.

And here's a lesson in integrity and values just about anyone could learn from. Mother could have made far more money accepting welfare and staying home, but she refused to accept charity, as she called it. She would work for two years by herself, keeping the family together, all but Snooky, who had put roots down in Mena and elected to stay with Grandmother. She did it with no medical insurance, too, and paid all the hospital bills for her hysterectomy and the bills for all our illnesses. We lived in the slums, right at the dividing line between the lowest rent houses for whites and the beginning of a Negro section of town, also a very low rent district. It must have horrified Steve and Becky, but they didn't say anything. However, we never thought of ourselves as slum people, simply because Mother wouldn't allow us to. We were poor, for certain, but self-supporting and that's the way she wanted it.

I'll continue this story of my life in Shreveport in the next segment, where I finished junior high and started high school, began drinking, worked mornings and evenings throwing a giant paper route and encountered other things that affected my life back then.

Part Five

Living in Shreveport as a Teen covers the years 1953 through 1956, from the time I was 13 until I entered the Air Force a few days past my 17th birthday. These were formative years, but Mother worked so hard at her job plus taking care of the house and us kids that she had little time for much instruction. It's my personal belief that she and Dad had already instilled a work ethic and a good moral sense into us. For all of Dad's faults he was a hard worker and honest. Also, what values they hadn't taught us, Steve and Becky had.

The last installment saw me taking a giant step which disassociated my life and my brother Gary's from Dad and returned us to Shreveport, where Mother now had five children to support on a waitress's salary. She managed it, somehow, for two years by herself.

My interest in writing continued in Shreveport but I have to admit, they were laughable, and as before, fairly well followed the plots of some of Heinlein's young adult novels or were written about worldwide disasters like some of the science fiction novels I read. The Day Of The Triffids was one in particular I remember. The only people I let see them were my brothers and sisters and none of them were very interested. Fiction writing was a talent and interest I guess resided only in me out of all six kids. Again, I don't remember ever finishing one of those manuscripts.

I had turned 13 before coming back to Shreveport and was then eligible for a paper route. In those days, the 1950s, all but rural paper routes were thrown by teenage boys. I got up at four each morning and spent almost three hours delivering papers, getting back to the house just in time for school. Then immediately after school, I did the same thing with an evening route. I did this in all kinds of weather and regardless of how I felt. All across America in the 50s the paperboy actually became an American icon. They carried the news into all kinds of neighborhoods, good, bad and terrible. I never worried about being bothered and I've never heard of any other paperboys who were, though I'm sure it must have happened sometime. But it was a different era back then. About a third of my route each day was through the Negro section of town. (That's what it was called back then, although most people said "nigger" rather than Negro. Negro was a term used only when colored people were within earshot. Sometimes the word "Jig" was used, which was acceptable.) Even back then, in that kind of environment, I was already sensing the injustice of a whole segment of our population being treated almost like slaves, in our part of the country anyway. I treated my colored customers just the same as I did anyone else, and said "sir" and "ma'am" to them just as I did to any adult. In that I was different than almost all of my contemporaries. Most people, when attempting to be polite to a colored person, simply called them by their first name.

Most of my route was in the poorer section of Shreveport, since that's where we lived. I was always interested in the colorful and odd customers, like the one-armed former soldier who had descended into alcoholism and his Japanese wife who cared for him. Or the old, old man with cancers growing from his skull who still liked to read the daily paper. Or the man I had to collect from early on payday before he got crazy drunk and mean. All the boys (and a few girls, or so I've been told) who had this kind of punishing routine of morning and evening paper routes had little time for extracurricular activities at school. This didn't bother me for several reasons.

First, I was still painfully shy and wasn't interested in much that went on in school. One reason, I think, is that my life wasn't like anyone else's at school. They all had both parents at home, so far as I remember. Also I had little in common with them. I don't remember anyone else liking to read as I did, although I'm sure there must have been kids with a similar bent. Some of the guys were already into dating and girlfriends and parties that I never got invited to, while the only girls I had the nerve to talk to were the ones who hung around the park after dark, where "nice" girls didn't go. The second reason is that by the eighth grade, I had already lost interest in school. This was abetted by the fact we lived right near a branch library. I spent most of what spare time I had reading, escaping into fictional worlds.

Back in the 50s, among youngsters, there was a peculiar division of girls that probably sounds strange today. There were "good girls" and "bad girls." The good girls were more or less treated as princesses, put on a pedestal, talked politely to and in general treated as if they might break if you got too close. With the "bad girls," on the other hand, almost anything went, but even with them, I was still abnormally shy. I didn't know anything about the "shyness gene" which has been recently discovered and that I must certainly have gotten. The division spoken of above wasn't near as total as it sounds. In any era, sex goes on, whether it's talked about or not, but in those days before birth control girls had to be extremely careful, which is one reason for the division, I think. The good girls had a dictum they adhered to until hormones finally overcame it (for some, anyway). It went like this: "above the waist, outside the clothes." That's pretty well how any of my contact with girls went for a long time, if that much.

The only real friend I had was a boy in somewhat the same circumstances as me, if not worse. Henry's father was in prison and his mother had children at home. Unlike my mother, though, his mother accepted welfare and lived on the government largess. He also had a paper route and we began to hang out together.

By the time I entered the ninth grade, I had no interest at all in school. I passed two courses that year with D- grades. Those turned out to be the only two high school credits I ever earned.

I began smoking at 13 and by the time I was 14 I was addicted and smoking openly. Mother did insist I buy my own cigarettes, but that presented no real problem since I had my paper route money. I was already buying my own school lunches and earning all my spending money. I guess we can excuse the smoking because there was no stigma about it then. It wasn't known how many health problems cigarettes caused, and about half the adult population smoked. Doing it was like an entry into the adult world, in a sense. A rite of passage, in a way.

My fascination with alcohol that began about age 15 is less excusable, considering what I had seen it do to Dad, and what I had seen of the derelicts, alcoholics and bums I met when living with him, and continued to see on my paper route. Nevertheless, by 15 and 16, Henry and I were drinking regularly on weekends. Getting liquor was quite easy. We simply stood outside a liquor store and waited until some seedy passerby came along who looked to be in need of money. He would always oblige us by buying us a pint of whiskey or vodka in exchange for enough money for a bottle of wine, or a dollar or two in cash.

Besides having no knowledge of the deleterious effects of long term smoking, I also knew nothing (nor did anyone else, for sure) about such a thing as addictive genes. Later on in life I realized all of us kids must have gotten a helping of that particular gene or genes from Dad, but at the time, all I knew was that drinking helped rid me of some of that awful shyness and got me to the stage where I could at least talk to members of the opposite sex, usually at the Louisiana Hayride where Henry and I went to drink our liquor and look for girls. Country and western musicians performed live there every Saturday night. About once a month we watched Elvis Presley before anyone else in America knew he existed.

When I was 15 or so, Mother married Jim, the man who had helped her when she thought her life was in danger. It had to be love, considering she had five kids at home! He was divorced and had two kids but they lived with their mother.

Jim was a good man, though for a while he had a drinking problem himself. However, he always made sure the bills were paid and a little put up for the future before he spent any money on honky tonking. That was his thing; he liked to just hang out in one of his several favorite bars and drink beer, listen to the juke box, play air hockey and talk to his cronies.

One night when Henry and I went to the Louisiana Hayride, I lost my virginity and got introduced to the inside of a country jail all in the same night. I was drinking, of course. From the hayride, I somehow wound up at a party at a girl's house whose mother wasn't at home (and who obviously gave her little supervision). She took me into a bedroom and introduced me to the mysteries of sex only an hour or two after I learned her name. Later that night me, her, and another older couple were riding in his car. He was drunk and had some vague notion of going somewhere. I don't remember the destination now, nor why me and the girl were with the other couple. Anyway, the ride went on and on. He had a flat and was so drunk he just kept on driving. Naturally, he was eventually pulled over by a State Trooper—in Arkansas!

We were in Arkansas and all four wound up in jail. The other three were released the next day. I sat in the jail for three days. I was fed hamburgers and coffee three times a day. Then for some reason, the juvenile authorities of Shreveport came and got me. I was taken to Shreveport and spent three days in jail there. In both cases, I still have no idea why I was held. No charges of any kind were ever filed. I saw the girl one more time, then Mother flat out asked me: "How would you like to have to marry a girl like that?" Remember, this was in the days before birth control pills and when abortion was completely illegal everywhere. I decided Mother had good advice and never went back to her house again.

Despite having my own money and being back with all my brothers and sisters, I wasn't happy. It wasn't a conscious thing always on my mind, but it was definitely there, a vague sense of things not being right. Looking back, I know what it was. I was simply lonely. I had no interest in school and didn't interact hardly at all with other students, male or female. I didn't know how. In fact, I started just not going to school. I would go to a café and drink coffee and eat donuts and read until the branch library opened, then go check out some books and stay in the park and read all day, or take a notebook along and write books I never finished. I had no friends except Henry, and while he was a loyal friend, our interests weren't the same. He never read books nor was interested in much except drinking and music. Most of the time I was withdrawn and a social wallflower. One day shortly after I turned 16, I decided to leave home. I have no idea what made me do it, other than that vague, persistent feeling of dissatisfaction with my life.

It wasn't a very rewarding decision. I had some fuzzy idea of finding work somewhere as a pin boy in a bowling alley but that's as far as my plans went. I wound up hitchhiking all the way to Arizona before eventually being picked up by the Highway Patrol. I was sent to a juvenile confinement facility. A week later Mother sent the money for a bus ticket and I gladly went back home.

That's when Mother laid down the law. She told me that since I wouldn't go to school, I could go to work; and so long as I wouldn't go to school, as soon as I found a job I would begin paying her and Jim room and board, and also begin repaying her for the bus ticket she had sent for me to get back home. It had cost $50, a lot of money in those days, especially for her and Jim.

Getting a job seemed like a pretty good idea to me. No more school!

I went to the employment office in downtown Shreveport to see what was available for a 16-year-old boy. There wasn't much, but the folks there were very nice. I was given a series of intelligence and aptitude tests. After completing them, the counselor tried very hard to talk me into going back to school but I was having none of it. I disliked school and wanted to go to work.

Despite my lowest test scores being in mechanical aptitude, the only job they could find for me was working in an ice cream factory for 75 cents an hour. It wasn't much, but Mother only charged me five dollars a week for room and board, and after I had paid back about half of what I owed her for the bus ticket, she let me off from paying the rest. She also helped me buy my first car, an old 1939 Chevrolet.

The work in the ice cream factory was just hard physical labor at first. Those were the days when a lot of factory work was done by human labor rather than machines. They tried me out first in the department that produced popsicles and ice cream bars. My job was to fill trays with the liquid solution, then place the tray on a moving belt in a tank of ice cold salt slush. At the same time, I had to watch the other end of the tank and remove the trays when the ingredients were frozen. This involved lifting the heavy tray, then dipping it into a vat of hot water to loosen the popsicles and ice cream bars and take them to the bagger, then start the whole process over again. Most of the work involved bending over and lifting. I don't know how much the trays weighed, but by the end of my first day it seemed like each one weighed a ton! Fortunately, the twice a day paper route carrying the heavy bags of newspapers had toughened me up; otherwise I don't think I could have made it. At 16, I weighed only about 110 pounds.

Eventually I was promoted to bagger, then to the ice cream machine. That was the top job in the little factory. I was glad to get away from the salt slush. It had caused sores, then scars on my thighs that I still have today. The ice cream machine was different and easier. Each day I put the machine together, made up the mix of whatever I was going to run through the machine that day and lifted the heavy 20- or 30-gallon solution and poured it into the machine. After it was frozen into a semi-solid, my job was to stand by the tube where the ice cream exited and keep containers ready for the exiting ice cream and put caps on them. At the end of the day I cleaned my machine scrupulously, making sure every single bit of debris was removed and every piece of the machine was sparkling clean and sterilized, ready for he next day.

Unfortunately, just about this time I began developing a gambling habit, another symptom of the addictive gene, I believe. My first gambling took the form of playing the pinball machines of those days, a nickel a pop, trying to get the balls to line up a certain way. The odds could be improved by adding more nickels, which I did. Sometimes I wound up wasting my whole paycheck in a single evening of playing the pinballs, hoping for a big payoff. Gambling was illegal but the café owner where I played had an understanding with the police. He seldom had to pay me anything, because almost inevitably when I did hit a big winner, I put the money right back into the machine.

I worked from March of the year I was 16 until August, then decided that maybe school did have its merits. I thought it would be better than backbreaking work in the ice cream plant. I got another paper route and started school again, and for the first time since the seventh grade made a real effort to study. I started out with all A's, but as the year wore on, my grades began drifting down. I just couldn't stand school, and still didn't interact with any of the other students other than the "bad" guys who hung out behind the gym and smoked during recess and lunch hour. Even though I had my own car and money, I was scared to ask any of the girls at school for a date. The only girls I had anything to do with were the pickups at drive-in movies or at the Louisiana Hayride and there weren't that many. I was still unhappy, in that vague, undefined way. I wanted more out of life than what I had, but I had no idea of how to go about getting it. I'm sure the teachers and other kids at school must have talked about what a weird kid I was, seldom saying anything to anyone, only showing up at school when I felt like it and not interacting at all with anyone other than Henry and a few of the other young hoodlums.

The day I turned 17, I asked Mother to sign the papers to let me enlist in the Air Force. Again, I think the decision was inspired by loneliness as much as anything, along with an attempt to change the situation by going somewhere else and doing something different. Perhaps all the moving as a youngster activated a gene for itchy feet, because me and both my brothers spent most of our lives always looking for what lay beyond the mountains, so to speak. The Air Force was my first journey beyond the mountains.

I went down and took all the Air Force tests, then came back with Mother the next day. The recruiting sergeant had my test scores in front of him. He looked at me and said, "Son, are you sure you don't want to go back to school?" Apparently, I had scored so much higher on the tests than most of the high school graduates that he felt it was his duty to try to get me back into school. I had known before this that I caught onto things easily when I made an effort, but this was the first time I had any indication I might have a high IQ, or that all the reading I did might have paid off. Anyway, I wasn't to be dissuaded. I wanted to enlist. Mother thought it was the best thing for me, too, and signed the papers. The next day I took my first plane ride, in an old DC-3, to San Antonio and Basic Training. The date was February 27^th, 1956.

The next installment will cover my time in the Air Force where a long career in medicine would begin.

Part Six

My time in the Air Force was from 1956 until 1960, a four-year enlistment. I grew up a lot during that time. The military introduced me to a whole different kind of life, just as it's been doing for young men and women since soldiering was invented. It also introduced me to some of the unsavory parts of life I hadn't seen yet, such as heavy drinking and gambling with cards.

My military career began during the Cold War, back when Communism, exemplified by China and the Soviet Union, assumed it was the wave of the future for us all, a proposition hotly disputed by the United States and the rest of the western world. This standoff led to threats and portents of nuclear war, which fortunately never happened, but for many years it meant the United States maintained a massive armed force, backed by thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons, ready to be launched at a moment's notice. Those who haven't lived in those times can hardly imagine the attitude of the population, that nuclear war could happen at almost any time. Those of us in the military were even more imbued with this attitude.

I joined the Air Force in the days when you weren't guaranteed training of your choice. You either enlisted or were drafted, then were told what kind of work you would do. This was after you completed Basic Training, of course.

Basic was my first introduction to working with groups. As a teenager I had been the epitome of a loner, absorbed in books and having no interest in school or any of the activities there. Surprisingly, I found that I liked the new life, in a way. The food was good, the exercise was terrific and the group companionship was strange but comforting. Everyone did things the same way, so I no longer felt like such an outsider.

I also joined the Air Force rather than any of the other services with the idea that soon the Air Force would be leading the way into space. I had been reading science fiction since finding that first tattered paperback in Mena. I still remember the story almost perfectly, although I can't recall the title. The Air Force was where I thought I might have a chance to be included in the forthcoming exploration of space. I wanted to be in on it somehow, maybe beginning as a jet mechanic and going on from there, despite my pathetic test scores in mechanical aptitude. When I broached the idea of space flight and how I wanted to be a part of it to the guys with me in Basic Training, I was roundly laughed at and I shut up about it in public. I never mentioned my idea to anyone again for many years, but still kept it in my head, and in my hopes, at the forefront of my mind. It was rather silly, looking back, how I thought a relatively uneducated young man could become a space pioneer and eventually the aspiration faded, though my interest in space exploration never faded; it only grew.

The Air Force, with a fine indifference to my desires, decided I would make a much better surgical specialist than jet mechanic. I'm sure they didn't have to examine my scores in mechanical aptitude very long to decide to keep me as far away as they could from jet engines. Mechanics was my worst test score.

I don't know what I had been thinking. Actually, I was doing more dreaming than thinking or I would have realized I would be going to school again regardless of what field the Air Force put me in, and that's exactly what happened. Shucks, I didn't even have to go anywhere else. San Antonio, where I completed my Basic Training, was also the site of all the medical training for the armed forces. Over the years I would become very familiar with that city.

I did poorly in the surgical technician school, as I usually did in any kind of formal study, but I did manage to pass the course—without having ever seen a live patient. It was all practice and lectures and most of it was excruciatingly boring to me. After graduation, my next stop was, by the luck of the draw, Bermuda, a vacation spot people paid lots of money to visit.

Unlike today, most of the women in the service back then were assigned to clerical jobs, except for the nurses of course, and there weren't nearly as many females in the service as now. I can't remember a single WAF assigned to the hospital, but perhaps they weren't sending them overseas then. Certainly none were present in the operating room where I gradually learned to assist in surgery, saw my first deaths up close, experienced the excitement of trauma cases, saw the agony of parents and relatives when they lost loved ones, and learned how thankful patients were after they had been cured. In Bermuda, and back in those times, the delivery room was also the responsibility of the surgical team, so I also got to help out there with deliveries, assisting the doctors and taking care of the immediate needs of the newborn and other tasks. It was all heady stuff for a 17-year-old. In short, I decided I liked medicine.

In Bermuda I was also introduced to poker and blackjack. Every payday there was lots of gambling that went on, even though technically it was against regulations. The officers and sergeants just looked the other way, knowing it was going to happen regardless of what they did. For a beginner at those games, I was amazingly lucky. The luck turned into an attitude, an aura of invincibility in the games. I had no idea of the odds or how to play them, but I did understand the idea of confidence and bluffing. Before long I became known as one of the "gamblers," the guys who usually won all the money. Not that I always won, of course, but I won often enough for it to become addictive for a long time.

For the first time I also had easy access to liquor. Cheap liquor. Drinking in the barracks wasn't allowed, but there were airmen's clubs where the lower grade enlisted men could buy beer and we were also allowed to buy a certain amount of hard liquor each month. This is a good example of the military mind at work. It was against regulations for lower grade enlisted men to buy mixed drinks, and drinking of any kind wasn't allowed in the barracks, yet we were allowed to buy four bottles of hard liquor a month! I guess the powers that be expected us to take it off the base to drink, but very little of it found its way that far, best as I remember. It was consumed clandestinely, in the barracks and in little alcoves that quickly became known in the barracks and elsewhere.

So far as female companionship went, I was lucky being so young, still only a few months past 17 and not looking much more than 15. Bermuda was a base where military dependents were allowed and I soon fell into their crowd. These were kids 18 and younger, there with their parents. I learned some of the ins and outs of normal dating practices, but was still incredibly naïve in many ways, and still so uncertain of myself that I couldn't bring myself to ask the girls for regular dates or to go to their homes. Mostly I met them at the terminal, where there was a huge café and sitting area for arriving and departing passengers. Still, I got a lot of much-needed experience, several years later than most of my contemporaries.

Bermuda was a good experience for me, marred only by still being attracted to alcohol and now to gambling. The alcohol led to a comical episode where I was court-martialed for being "Drunk on Station," as if most of the young men didn't get fairly well inebriated most nights when they had the money. Service members could drink back then before they were 21. Theoretically, airmen were supposed to be 18 before being allowed to buy alcohol but no one ever asked the 17-year-olds like me for identification.

The court-martial happened after I had finally gotten it through my head that fiction wasn't the only thing in life and that I needed to learn more. I took a GED test and passed it with ease, then took my first college course, Introduction to Philosophy. At the same time, I had sent off for some books giving a layman's knowledge of various specialties like Math, English, History... and Law. I had just read through the law book when my court-martial came up. Suddenly I fancied myself a lawyer and defended myself. Much to everyone's surprise, including the commander who had pressed the charges, I was found Not Guilty. It might have been better if I hadn't, because the outcome gave me a big head. I got the attitude I could get away with almost anything and continued along my merry way, drinking, gambling and carousing to my heart's content.

I want to return to that philosophy course. Me taking it, and beginning my college career (which was to extend 15 years before I finally earned a degree) was instigated by the normal discourse with guys in the surgical department where I worked. Like most young men (and women, too, I presume), when congregated together, away from home for the first time, we began to debate the whichness of what. The sophomoric dialog, I think it's been called ever since colleges began. Even before leaving home, and despite the rigorous religious instruction from Steve and Becky, and my mother's devoutness, I had begun doubting the merits and logic of religion. In fact, after leaving Dad and going back to Shreveport, I didn't have much use for religion. By 16 I was doubting the very existence of God and by the time I got to Bermuda, I was calling myself an out and out atheist (like most youngsters, I tended to see things in black and white, with no in between). This led to lots of arguments, of course, since I was in a very distinct minority. Anyway, me and the guys tossed ideas back and forth while at work and off duty, and especially while consuming beer.

The military services offer what they call extension college courses, where selected colleges will send professors to stations overseas and teach college level courses for credit. At least they did at the time. One of my friends at work who usually took the opposite stance from me in matters of religion suggested we take the philosophy course when it was offered to see if it would settle any of our debates. It didn't but I learned that the questions had been around for a very long time—and were no nearer to having definitive, proven answers now than they were in the time of Plato and Socrates. It was the first structured educational material since the seventh grade I actually enjoyed.

In Bermuda, I also earned my first money as a writer, a five dollar third prize for a short story contest. I was still writing and experimenting a little now with short stories. Winning the prize was nice, but that would be the last income from writing I would see for a very long time.

Shortly after the court-martial, and after I had been forgiven for more or less making a fool of the hospital commander, the Air Force Academy was opened up for enlisted men—if they could pass the tests to get in. When this was announced, I decided to apply. I took the written test, not really thinking I'd be able to pass it with so little formal schooling, but thought it worth a try. To my surprise, I made the highest score on the base! After that, I confidently went about taking the physical exam. And that's where I foundered. I had forgotten all about my eyesight. I wasn't wearing glasses, but it turned out that I was nearsighted, just as I had been when I was nine or ten and Dad wouldn't let me have glasses for fear of me appearing a "sissy." So much for the Academy. Looking back, it's very doubtful I would have succeeded at the Academy anyway. With my limited background, I probably would have foundered as soon as I encountered physics or chemistry, and even before then my lax study habits would almost certainly have caused me to flunk out.

I became enamored of one girl in Bermuda, my first case of puppy love. It went on even after we quit seeing each other, and continued to bother me for a long time. A broken heart can be as devastating and hurt as much for a youngster as unrequited love does as an adult. I think perhaps most of us go through something similar; it's just that some of us suffer with it more than others. There was another girl I saw off and on the whole time I was in Bermuda but I could never bring myself to get into formal dating with her—I simply didn't know the ins and outs of it, how to react to parents and so forth. We met at the movies and at the terminal and sometimes I sneaked over to the house where she was babysitting and we would make out in a very immature fashion, not taking it very far at all. She was a "nice girl." It would take me a long time to get rid of that mindset and I think remnants of it are still with me today. I'm sure I missed out on a lot of lovely experiences because of it.

I continued to gamble and win far more than I lost. One of my unlucky times happened to fall on the day before I was to leave Bermuda. It was payday and I also had my travel pay. I lost the whole bundle. After the plane ride to New Jersey, I cashed in all my remaining assets, a $50 U.S. Savings bond I had with me, and bought a bus ticket home. It left me with just enough money for cigarettes and sandwiches for the 50-hour trip.

Back in the 50s, riding the Greyhound buses was something just about everyone from the mid to lower economic strata did. There was another bus company back then, too, Trailways. Anyway, I spent many hours on buses during my first years in the service. Those were the days of segregation in the South. Once I created a sensation simply by riding for several hundred miles with a Negro girl, also in the Air Force. On one of those rides, the bus got crowded. An old man got on the bus and noticed that several white people were having to stand near the front of the bus. Negroes, of course, rode in the back. The old man shouted, "How long are they going to leave us standing!" The bus driver promptly ordered some seats being used by Negroes vacated so whites could sit down. Every time I saw scenes like that, I thought how unfair it was, but I was never one to make a scene. I didn't say anything.

That brings back a memory from 1954, right after the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in schools was unconstitutional. I was standing at a trolley stop waiting to go somewhere. Next to me were two middle-aged white women. I overheard one of them saying to the other, "Can you imagine our children having to go to school and sit with dirty, smelly niggers?" I was 15. I wanted to tell the women that I wouldn't have minded going to school with Negroes, but I didn't speak up. I'm just not confrontational nor argumentative and never have been.

I should mention that I got a letter from Dad while I was in Bermuda. I took a ten-day leave and went home to see him while he was briefly in Shreveport. We didn't mention my actions in leaving him in Fort Worth. It was an uneasy reunion at first but we both soon relaxed, and I saw him on and off for the rest of my life.

After two years in Bermuda I was sent to Abilene, Texas. By then I had a car and had received a couple of promotions. I should have been saving money, but I wasn't. It all went toward drinking and carousing in Abilene and getting together with some other guys and driving to Mexico for fun and games. My only real accomplishment was taking a couple of college courses given on base. I took English and Algebra and made A's in both courses. As is apparent, I had learned that school was important, despite how boring most of it still was to me. I started part time at the local college, but halfway through the semester, I got into trouble again.

Abilene was a dry town. No liquor could be legally sold within the county. One night I was out with another guy. We ran out of alcohol. I was assigned to the Emergency Room by then and, half drunk, had what I thought was a brilliant idea. We'd simply drop by the Emergency Room and I'd pick up a couple of bottles of "G.I. Gin," which was mostly ethyl alcohol with a little juniper berry flavoring. It was normally issued as a cough medicine but could serve as a source of alcohol in a pinch.

There was a prissy, always-obey-the-rules airman on duty. He refused to give me any G.I. Gin, so I politely took it and screeched out of the Emergency Room driveway where I had been parked. Naturally, Mr. Prissy turned me in and a couple of hours later we were picked up by the cops. They turned us over to the Military Police. Soon afterward, I found myself scheduled for another court-martial, this time a more serious one. A couple of months earlier I had defended myself in court again, a civilian one this time, again for drinking, and again had been acquitted, using rules of evidence and testimony I had my witnesses practice in advance. The judge announced, "I have to acquit you on the basis of your defense—but I still think you were guilty as hell." I didn't let his words bother me. I thought I was on a roll. And I was, sort of.

For the court-martial, I laid out a defense plan for the attorney I had been assigned. He blinked and hemmed and hawed, thinking I should plead guilty, but I was having none of it. Since it was my choice, he had to do as I asked. He used the defense I told him to but commented, "This is the first time I've ever had a client tell me how to run his defense." I was guilty as hell, of course, but the end result was a split decision. I was acquitted on the theft charge (for stealing the cough medicine) but found guilty of reckless driving (making my getaway). It was all a kind of game to me, and a much talked about event on the base. It was even written up in the local newspaper, which sent a reporter out to cover the trial. My punishment was a simple reduction by one rank, which didn't really bother me since I was nearly finished with my four-year enlistment anyway.

It was a good thing my enlistment was running out. In Abilene I continued gambling, and it involved larger stakes now. I always sought out the big games. My luck continued, augmented by my "can't lose" attitude that fooled a lot of far more experienced gamblers than me. But luck can't continue forever and I had enjoyed a long run of it. The end came one night in the biggest poker game I had ever been in, and involved the biggest pot I'd ever played for, well over $1000, the equivalent in today's money of at least $10,000 and probably more. We were playing seven card stud, pot limit. I had three kings showing. The other hands indicated the probability of a straight flush, a straight and a full house. I didn't improve my hand at all, and looking at the other probabilities around the table, didn't see how I could possibly win. The guy in front of me bet five dollars. To this day, I don't know why I didn't at least call the bet. After all, I had several hundred dollars already in the pot. I didn't though. The other two players simply called the bet. And I will be damned if it didn't turn out that two pair won the pot! I was devastated that I had folded my three kings. Not only that, my confidence was completely broken. I never again was able to play poker with the kind of assurance that goes a long way toward winning. I continued to play but went into debt.

Before being discharged, I took a month's leave and went to California and worked with Dad and my brother Gary, doing migrant labor in order to help pay off some of my debts. We picked peaches and apricots and harvested hay. It was only the second time I had seen Dad since I was 13. It was good seeing my brother and more important, working with him and getting to know him as a man. I think that was the point we became best friends as well as brothers. He had already signed up with the Marines and was simply taking a few months off first to have a little adventure. During the time I was with him and Dad, it was a hand to mouth existence, as is true for most migrant workers, but we did have some good times—and some scary moments, like when we were going down a mountain and the hood came loose and blew back over the windshield, blinding Dad. I was in the front seat and told him how close to the edge of he road he was coming as he slowed down. We tied the hood and went on and never did get it fixed. Dad was a pretty good cook and did most of that, but when he had money he was constantly drinking. I spent all my earnings except enough to make some payments on a loan, then hitchhiked back to Texas. I really hadn't made anywhere near the amount of money Dad had promised I could earn by doing that kind of work.

One of the guys I hung around with in Abilene, named William but called Bill of course, was a brilliant young man but a total alcoholic already. He had been busted to private numerous times. I don't know what caused me to gravitate to that kind of person, but most likely it was kind seeking kind. I wasn't drinking nearly as much as him, though. Nevertheless, he had such a unique, inquiring mind that I really liked the guy. We took several trips to Mexico, along with some other guys, splitting the gas money. The trips mostly involved heavy drinking and heavy playing with the girls in the seedy section of Ciudad Acuna, across the border from Del Rio. Once when Bill tried bringing back too much liquor, he got his car impounded because he didn't have enough money to pay the fine. We all had to hitchhike back to Abilene. I was still suffering from residual effects of alcohol (or more likely was simply directionally challenged) and got off track. I wound up in a city two hundred miles west of Abilene and got picked up by the cops for a reason I don't remember now. They started to lock me up for a reason I also don't remember, but when they saw my I.D. card with the big red "MEDIC" stamped on it, they asked me about my job. We got to talking and they finally pointed me in the right direction, told me to be careful, and let me go. I got back to Abilene just in time to get to work and avoid being AWOL. I learned after I left the Air Force that Bill had been released from the Air Force with a General Discharge under honorable conditions. He was probably lucky to get away that easily, as much trouble as he was constantly in with his drinking. He even stole the liquor I had bought for a special occasion, my wedding.

It wasn't much of a marriage. I met Annette one night when I was out cruising with a couple of other guys. We began dating and a couple of months later decided to get married for some reason I don't even remember now. It sure wasn't love. Anyway, we would up living together only ten days then both of us realized we had made a mistake and parted company. I'm reminded of my wife Betty's short story, Cooking 101 For Newlyweds. All Annette knew how to cook was tacos. I ate tacos until they were running out my ears. I usually ate breakfast on the base, then went to school. I was taking eight hours at a local college and doing really well until I got into the trouble with the cough medicine I mentioned previously. I was working nights so we didn't see each other much anyway. Not many people even know about that brief marriage because I hardly ever mention it to anyone. It really didn't seem like a marriage then and never did afterwards, not even to this day.

Remember how I said this was in the days of the Cold War? I was reminded of it one day when several other medics and I were taken to a warehouse and measured for arctic gear. I mean real arctic, with fur lined boots and parkas with fur lined hoods and other clothing to stay warm at temperatures well below zero. We weren't told why we were told to try on the arctic gear and stamp it with our names and I have never learned why to this day. Possibly it was for prospective duty on one of the floating icebergs the military used for a few years as bases. Whatever it was, I'm glad I didn't get sent. I have detested cold weather ever since one day in Basic Training when we were left standing in formation out in a north wind with the temperature in the 30s and wearing nothing but fatigues. I have never been so cold as I was those 30 minutes and I can recall how miserable I was to this day and start shivering!

I was discharged from the Air Force in February 1960 and returned to Shreveport to look for work. I was stone cold broke, my car had been sold for junk and I had no job. However, I had been in contact again with Dad. When he heard I was out of the Air Force, he told me to come to Mena, in Arkansas where Gary and I had stayed with Grandmother those few months when we were still in elementary school. He said he could get me a job working in the timber. The job was girdling the oaks and sweet gum trees to kill them and let the pine grow. I packed up and headed to Arkansas with my last $10. Mother wanted me to stick around Shreveport for a while longer, but I wanted a job. I was tired of loafing and not having any money.

The work in the timber proved to be physically demanding, but nothing I couldn't handle. I spent about half my time with an ax, chopping rings around the larger trees and cutting down the saplings. The other share of my time, I carried a bucket of kerosene mixed with oil and a brush. That duty was to brush the kerosene/oil mixture on all the circles me and Dad and another man had cut out of trees and to brush it on the stumps of the saplings.

That job eventually ran out, but we found work at odd jobs for another month or so. When we weren't working, Dad would buy some "wildcat," the moonshine whiskey that was produced in quantity in the area, and go carousing in his old car. I went with him a couple of times but found little of interest in the out-of-the-way joints over in Oklahoma where we had to go to buy liquor legally. I found a 16-year-old girlfriend and usually spent Sundays with her. It wasn't anything serious, though.

The week before we intended to leave for California to begin working the fruit picking circuit, Dad went out and got thrown in jail for drunk driving. I borrowed the money to pay his fine, which was all that happened to drunk drivers in those days. The following week we loaded up and started for California.

I could probably write a separate book about our adventures on that trip to California. The first problem was that a rod started knocking and we were barely into Oklahoma. We stopped at a small town garage run by a nice family, the Sullivans. The Sullivan brothers did their best but they couldn't get to the problem without tearing the engine apart and we didn't have the money for that. The family did put us up for the night and fed us and didn't charge anything for all the work they had done. We decided to try to make it on to Abilene where I knew a woman we could stay with. Surprisingly, we did make it, with the rod banging away all the time.

In Abilene we stayed with the woman I knew from my last couple of months in the Air Force. We had practically lived together for a while before I gradually withdrew. She was in her 30s with five kids and an abusive husband who had married her for what little money she had, then wasted it all on an insurance scheme of some sort that he wound up in prison for. She put Dad and me up for a couple of days while we sold the car to a junk dealer for $100. Dad had decided it would never make it to California. Now we were reduced to hitchhiking, usually a pretty good way of getting around in those days, but we were two grown men, lugging four suitcases. It proved hard to get many rides. A day and a half later we were only 50 miles farther down the road. Dad said he'd had enough of hitchhiking and suggested we try riding the rails. Fortunately, there was a railroad yard nearby and Dad, an old railroad man (and one with lots of experience the last few years in hitching rides on freight trains), got us on a train heading in the right direction. I still don't know how he knew which freight train to get on. On the first one, we had to ride in that compartment at the front of what I called the "Oil Car." It was kind of cold but we managed okay and the next day we switched trains. That time we found an empty box car and rode it all the way to Modesto, California. I hadn't read "The Grapes Of Wrath" at the time, but if I had, I might have felt like I was living part of the novel, what with riding freights, picking fruit, riding in jalopies and so forth.

One of Dad's friends put us up for a few days. We slept in one of the campers that fit on pickup trucks, only this one was on the ground. Dad found us work the next day, chopping cotton; there wasn't any fruit in the area ready just yet. After about three weeks of chopping cotton in the California heat for 90 cents an hour, I concluded that farm work was no life for me. I decided to join the Army and see what they had to offer—never once imagining that in the future, the last 20 years of my working life would be spent farming! The recruiting sergeant told me he would get me sent to medical laboratory school. I wanted it because I knew from hanging around with Bill that lab techs could always get a job.

The next installment of my memoirs will cover the first part of my Army career, where I got married and got into trouble again, flubbed a great educational opportunity and got ready for my first tour of Vietnam.

Part Seven

The last installment ended as I was chopping cotton in California and decided to join the Army. I can say for a fact, chopping cotton is a no good way to make a living. I could do it, sure, but 90 cents an hour was barely enough to eat and pay rent. I also felt completely out of place. The other workers were mostly from Mexico or older men like my Dad who had lost any ambition to do much more than make enough money to live on a marginal basis and keep a liquor supply handy. More and more I remembered the military life and how good it had been for me. I also remembered how my friend Bill from the Air Force had always been able to get a part time job as a lab tech. I went to see a recruiting sergeant for the Army.

My plans were to enlist for one three-year term, enough to get some training as a laboratory technician, then get out and go to college while working part time, or full time if necessary. I had met some lab techs in the Air Force and they were always in demand for part time or even full time jobs. The recruiting sergeant, with the mendacity their kind is noted for, or were in those days, assured me I'd go immediately to lab school. He was lying through his teeth but I was too naïve to realize it.

A month after enlisting, I found myself in Hawaii, working as an on-the-job trainee in the pharmacy at the huge 1500-bed medical complex, Tripler General Hospital. I couldn't complain about the assignment. Shucks, I was the envy of some of the other enlistees who went to Korea, Alaska and some other less than desirable posts. This was my second overseas posting and both had been plum assignments. I was very resentful that I hadn't gotten into the lab, though. I don't know why the officer in charge of placing enlisted men in the right jobs didn't give me the lab. He talked to me in a big open office with lots of desks. He called over another officer and several sergeants and kept exclaiming, "Look at those test scores! Just look at those scores!" These were the aptitude and intelligence test scores given to me in California right after joining the Army. I took them while suffering with a terrible hangover, so bad I later made a story of it which was published in my non-fiction collection, Laughing All The Way, the sequel to Life On Santa Claus Lane. Both these books are in the humor category, but I certainly didn't feel much humor while taking those tests! Lord only knows how high I might have scored if I had given a damn about anything that day except my splitting head and unruly stomach, both promising to kill me any moment. Anyway, I wound up working in the pharmacy, the last place someone with an addictive personality gene should have been assigned. Of course the Army had no idea, nor did I, that such a thing existed back then. The addictive gene hadn't been discovered yet (and still hasn't been conclusively proven, for that matter), but later on I would read about studies showing the addictive syndrome is almost certainly an inheritable trait.

Back in the early 60s, there wasn't much control over amphetamines. After I was settled down at work in the pharmacy, I began taking college courses again, as well as writing a few stories that didn't sell. This time the courses I took were Anthropology and Psychology. I found that dextroamphetamine pills helped me study. That fact was to have consequences later. At the same time I was taking courses, I also took the college level GED test and passed it with ease. I also began taking what they called "college bypass" exams, where if you thought you knew enough about a subject, you could take the final exam and get credit with the Army Educational Institute for college credits. Many colleges also accepted these bypass tests as proof of mastery of the subject. I began taking all the tests available, and earned more than a semester of credit in "soft subjects" before finally flunking one. All that reading I'd done over my life had paid off.

One day I was in the hospital library and met the woman I would soon marry. She was there visiting someone and had gone to the library to look something up. Connie was an officer's daughter, and a religious officer at that. He didn't approve of us going together. And everyone knows what happens when parents disapprove. It just makes kids want to do the very thing they're forbidden to do. And looking back, I have to admit I was still a kid in some ways. And was still very uncomfortable in social situations because I never knew how to act. I can now understand Al's reluctance to let us get married. I had a rather shaky background and he had delved into my Army records, particularly the religious preference and practices sheet, something no one but the Chaplain should have seen. In it I had said I never went to church and had no religion. This was anathema to Al, a very religious man.

Anyway, Connie and I overcame the obstacles and were married in 1961. Our son, Allan, was born the next year. I was only a PFC in the Army and had to work part time to support us. Hawaii was a very expensive place to live. In fact, I held two jobs. One was running a little library, and the other was as a busboy at an officer's club. With two jobs and my Army duties, it didn't leave much time for family life, and truth be told, this wasn't a marriage made in heaven. Connie never read a book and could never understand why I took time away from her to read. There were other issues, but essentially, we were two people who were never going to get along real well after the first bloom wore off. I hated argument and confrontation and Connie could argue a brick wall into rubble, just as an example.

I do want to mention that after we were married, Connie's parents couldn't have treated me better if I had been their son. Al in particular went out of his way to accept me, even when I embarrassed him sometimes with other officers when I didn't know how to act. He was really a good man in almost all respects and it's a shame he died so young, at only 48, from cancer.

After Allan was born, I still wanted to get into the lab. First I applied for a special college program, where the Army would send me to college to get a degree in Medical Technology. Then while waiting on it, and frankly not expecting it to be approved considering my past behavioral record and lack of preparation for a science curriculum, I re-enlisted in the Army for the Basic Lab School. This meant a return to San Antonio, where my military career began.

I was the honor graduate of the Army Basic Lab School. Then, just as I was finishing that up, I was approved for the college training, much to my surprise. I had to add some more years to my obligation to the Army, but did so happily. I selected the University Of Southwestern Louisiana as my school. In January of 1963 I arrived. This was an extraordinary assignment, one very few enlisted men ever got. It meant three years of doing nothing but going to college, and being PAID for it, then at the end I would have a B.S. degree in Medical Technology and would be a sure bet for a commission as a captain. Shucks, the Army even paid me extra because I lived away from a base and couldn't shop in the Post Exchange.

Sounds great, huh? It was—or should have been, except for several factors.

First, Connie and I weren't getting along. I had pretty well lost interest in her, but wouldn't admit it to her. And I was still drinking quite a lot, which certainly didn't help our relationship. And finally there were the amphetamines. I took them to study, but while they might help for a while, eventually they become a bad habit. While they make you think you're really learning, you aren't. You're actually doing worse than you would had you left the pills alone. I wouldn't admit it to myself, though, and just kept taking more and more of them. And then there was the lack of preparation for the hard sciences above all else. Without the other distractions I might have made it, but it would have been hard. I passed the first semester, but that was the last. By the end of the year I had flunked out.

Just a note here about my brother Gary again. He was either in the last stages of flight school or had just finished; I can't remember which. At any rate he did graduate and had a lot of combat time in Vietnam. Just recently we were talking about our past and I mentioned the big opportunity I had lost. In return he told me some things he had only hinted at before. He said that some of the higher ranking Marine officers really liked him and wanted to groom him for higher command or for test pilot school or perhaps both. He could have done just about anything he wanted. He was a terrific flyer by all accounts. Instead, he turned to drinking and gambling like me and didn't get above the rank of captain. He did put in 20 years, though, and is retired from the Marines on total disability due to war wounds and other factors. Anyway, I wanted to point out again how the addictive gene runs in our family.

The Army sent Connie and me back to San Antonio, where I brooded about my failure, about our marriage, about what I was going to do in the future, and what to do about my addiction to amphetamines, not to mention alcohol. I was really hooked bad on the pills by then and drinking more than usual as well. Finally one night I got up, took the car and drove to the main highway leading west, then got out and started hitchhiking, leaving the car and our bank account for Connie. I didn't know where I was going or what I was going to do but I knew I had to do something. The Army frowns on soldiers leaving without their say-so, but I just didn't care at that point. I expected Connie to go to her parents, but instead she went to mine and stayed there.

I hitchhiked to California and wandered around, working odd jobs and earning just enough money to eat on and pay for rooms in cheap hotels. One morning while I was still AWOL, I finally realized what I was doing to my life and my future with those amphetamine pills. I gritted my teeth, took stock of where I was and what I was doing, and poured all my pills down a commode and never took another one in my life. A couple of weeks later I was back with the Army—in the stockade.

Naturally, I was court-martialed, and this time I had no way out. I was busted all the way down to private, but was released from the stockade on parole. Connie came out to join me and we decided to try to make a go of the marriage, though I think it was mostly a matter of neither of us knowing what else to do. Again, her parents treated me well despite the way I had acted.

All the while I was married to Connie I was trying to write but very unsuccessfully. I got enamored with poetry for a while and produced what was probably some of the worst verse ever put to paper. I wrote a few short stories but even I could see they weren't worth trying to sell.

After serving my time on parole, I was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia and gradually began making my rank back. Also, without the pills to make me think my writing was on a par with Steinbeck, I tried writing a couple of novels. They were better than anything I had produced before, but I didn't finish them.

I was stationed with an evacuation hospital, a unit which was mostly inactive except for training exercises. The rest of the time, the medics either worked in the base hospital laboratory or were sent in pairs out to take care of any medical emergencies at training sites in the area. I went on many of these. Most were boring, but I did spend a few days watching paratroop training. The worst injury we had to deal with until the final exercise, a real jump, was a double broken collarbone. I also spent two weeks up in the mountains of northern Georgia, as a medic with the Rangers at their mountain training. I didn't actually participate in the training, a good thing I think. I wasn't cut out for that type of soldiering.

A year later, in August of 1965, I was sent to the Army's year-long Advanced Lab School. I applied myself, without the benefit of pills this time, and graduated top in my class and received another promotion. While I was in school I wrote about two thirds of a novel that I thought was quite good (and still do) but I got stuck with the characters in so much trouble I couldn't figure out a way to get them out of it. Eventually, the story became dated and I discarded it.

Before graduation from the Advanced Lab School, I also volunteered for Vietnam. Asking to go to Vietnam was like waving a red flag in front of Connie. I knew in advance what her reaction would be. While I was stationed in Georgia, I had been alerted for shipment to Nicaragua for our little war there. Connie almost drove everyone in the unit where I had been serving crazy—and me, too. She was certain if I ever set foot in the country I would be killed immediately.

As it wound up, the war in Nicaragua was over before our unit shipped out, but the experience led me to know Connie couldn't stand the idea of me wanting to go to Vietnam and thought I was crazy. In my own mind, I thought I'd have a chance of making more rank there, and also, like most young men who haven't been in a war, the idea of participating in one seemed glamorous to me. Also, as a soldier, I told myself that so long as we were fighting a war, that's where I should be. I didn't like the thought that other soldiers I knew had already served there while I hadn't. I don't think that covers it all, though. As much as anything, I think I was wanting to get away again, and that was an honorable way to do it. I didn't know it, but I was going to have another education, in real life this time.

The next installment will cover some of the time I spent in Vietnam, the time between tours, divorce, and leaving the Army, only seven years short of retirement.

Part Eight

Before leaving for Vietnam, Connie and Allan and I drove to California and spent a couple of weeks with her parents. We all wanted Connie to stay with her grandmother, who wanted to help her with Allan and give her a place to stay while I was gone but Connie didn't want to do that. It wound up with me buying her some rather expensive furniture and her renting a place by herself.

I left for that first tour in August of 1966, a month after graduation from the Advanced Medical Laboratory Technician School. I don't recall exactly what I was expecting from a war, but most likely it was like something resembling Korea or WWII rather than what Vietnam was really like. There were no front lines. The whole country was a war zone, with very few exceptions and there was no way to tell friend from foe unless the foe was carrying a weapon—but many of the Viet Cong didn't. They posed as civilians and infiltrated the Vietnamese government and military as well as spying on us under the guise of hired workers, interpreters and the like.

The big commercial airline carrying me and a couple hundred other soldiers landed at the air base near Saigon. We were all dressed in stateside fatigues and leather boots, making us stand out from the veterans who were mostly wearing jungle fatigues and jungle boots by this time. In fact, many of the grunts out in the boonies who really needed the lightweight garments and special boots couldn't get them because supply clerks were giving or selling them to their friends or issuing them to officers so they looked like real combat troopers, even though they might have administrative jobs far removed from combat. In the meantime the poor grunts out in the field suffered with rotting leather boots and the hot stateside fatigues.

We were trundled off to a processing barracks where bunks were stacked three high in a large open building. When I got up the next morning before daylight, I could look outside and see flares and hear artillery in the distance. From that day on I was seldom out of hearing of artillery and/or bombs and never out of hearing of the clatter of helicopters. I spent a day or two waiting on my assignment, watching bunkers being built while nominally supervising the process. All I was really doing was making sure the lower grade men kept busy. They knew more about what they were doing than I did. Anyone who had been in Vietnam long learned how to build bunkers.

The third day I traveled by truck to my unit, a Dispensary Team providing medical support to a fuel transport battalion. The compound was only a few miles from the huge logistics and administrative center of Long Binh but it might as well have been a thousand so far as the isolation and going anywhere after dark was concerned. The compound was surrounded by jungle and the jungle was infested with Viet Cong. The compound was completely enclosed by what looked like enough barbed wire to fence off Texas and Alaska combined. Curiously, the lush jungle didn't approach the wire and there was never a need for brush clearing operations from the inside. After I had been in country for a while I noticed that most roads weren't plagued by encroaching brush, either. I learned later that this was due to liberal applications of a herbicide named Agent Orange. That term and the results of coming into contact with Agent Orange would come back to haunt me and many other troops later, but at the time no one thought anything about it. Agent Orange had been ruled safe. In fact, I will quote from an article: "Facts on File, Sep. 19-25, 1968, Defoliation Report. (Excerpted from the book, Doc: Platoon Medic by Daniel Evans, Jr.). U.S. Officials asserted at a news conference in Saigon Sept 20 that the American defoliation in selected areas of South Vietnam had caused no harmful effects on human or animal life…"

Conditions were still fairly primitive on the compound at that time. My first day, I was taken outside the compound to a row of shanties and shown things I needed to buy on the local market. They included a big tin basin for washing and shaving, a crudely made foot locker (like a big keepsake chest but very shoddy) and a wooden packing crate to hang my fatigues. The Army was supposed to provide these items but they simply weren't available at that time for isolated compounds.

The next day I went to work. The dispensary was right beside the tent we slept in. It was a long building with wooden floors, walls to about chest high, then part of it, including my lab, was screened to where the roof of corrugated steel began. This was to allow air to circulate because there certainly wasn't any air conditioning! My lab was a one-man operation located at the very back of the dispensary. There was a helicopter landing pad nearby. Every time a chopper came in, it would cover me and everything in the lab with another quarter inch of red dust. It seemed that invariably, right after I had done my housekeeping chores for the day, a helicopter would land and give me another helping of red dust to rake off the shelves. Eventually I learned to use towels to cover anything of value and shake them out several times a day.

There was room inside the dispensary for only a few patients at a time. All the others had to wait outside, rain or shine. And believe me, it could rain! A poncho wasn't much protection.

The equipment I had to work with dated from shortly after WWI up to about the beginning of WWII. A generator provided electricity, but I had to use a little alcohol stove and move it in and out from under a tray I had rigged to keep water at the correct temperatures for tests. Hardly a day went by but what I forgot to move the stove and ruined the blood serum I was warming. I quickly learned to separate it into portions so I didn't have to call the troops back for more blood when I ruined a batch.

There really wasn't a whole lot to do at the dispensary. We were caring for healthy young men and seldom had combat casualties; they went to other units. Mostly we treated wounds from leeches, venereal diseases the troops picked up from stopping at a truck wash on their fuel delivery runs, a plethora of parasite infections, and various upper respiratory and lower intestinal ailments. I quickly became an expert in diagnosing, identifying and treating sexually transmitted diseases. I found that the worst cases came from troops who had taken R&R (rest and recuperation) in Bangkok, Thailand. I would have occasion to remember that fact years in the future, when I was on vacation in Thailand. I wouldn't have touched any of the girls there for all the money in the world, even if I hadn't been married then and had my wife with me. Another common ailment was strained backs from lifting too many sandbags while building bunkers. Sick call was usually over by ten o'clock and the rest of the day was free except for one man left to take care of emergencies.

Almost from the first night, I was introduced to the sound of zinging bullets. The Viet Cong couldn't overrun the compound but they liked to sneak up close during the night and fire a few random rifle rounds into the compound to make us head for the bunkers and ruin our sleep. Most of us ignored the sniping, but every now and then the VC brought up a machine gun and shot a belt or two of ammunition into the compound. On those occasions, we did go to the bunker. Occasionally we had to replace sandbags which had bullet holes in them and were leaking but that was about the extent of the damage.

We had a Mama-San who kept the tent and dispensary swept and our fatigues and the dispensary linen washed and dried, so there weren't even the routine housekeeping tasks to occupy our off hours. Mostly we spent the time drinking beer or, when we had the money, taking the jeep into Binh Hoa, a nearby city, and carousing in the bars and with the girls. (I didn't know it until many years later, but Binh Hoa was the area of a large spill of Agent Orange.) At first I went along and drank and ate the local food and drink, but left the girls alone. I was still married. But after the first month, Connie stopped writing. I mean stopped, completely. Eventually I figured out what that meant and found my own girlfriend. However, I never worried about VD myself. I always took a large prophylactic dose of tetracycline beforehand and was always drinking plenty of beer, necessitating frequent trips to the bathroom which helped flush away potentially harmful germs.

Sometimes we were confined to the compound completely because of large-scale enemy activity in the surrounding jungle. It was close enough to see the tracers from the Gatlin gun of Puff the Magic Dragon, or during daylight we might see the jets making bombing runs. Sometimes a mortar team would set up inside the compound to fire flares or supporting fire for grunts who had set up an ambush site. That was the one thing that could keep me awake. The sounds of artillery or bombs didn't bother me but a mortar going off 30 or 40 yards away is incredibly loud. However, the loudest noise I heard that whole first tour was when a Viet Cong disguised as a civilian worker managed to plant some explosives in the ammunition dump at Long Binh. When they went off it was loud enough to hurt my ears and the concussion knocked me off my bunk from several miles away. A huge mushroom cloud lifted into the sky and explosions went on and on for the rest of the day and all through the night from bombs and artillery shells heating up and going off. I made a rough calculation of about 25,000 explosions before the ammo dump was burned out. About a week later, the little armed forces newspaper reported that a couple of trucks and a small amount of ordinance had been destroyed. I never believed much in the reporting of the war after that.

A lot of the fighting was close enough that planes dropped their propaganda leaflets on us instead of on the VC. On one occasion I saw a jet get hit and go down after a bombing run. Occasionally one of the fuel trucks was hit by a mine while on a run. Once some idiots tried leaving the compound at night in a jeep. There were the driver and three passengers. The jeep was blown up with a claymore mine set by the VC just for that purpose. They had probably been alerted by one of the innumerable civilian workers in the compound that a jeep was going out that night. Two of the troops were killed while the others managed to evade and hide until the road was opened the next morning. The commanding officer had the remnants of the jeep put on a pedestal as a reminder. Night belonged to the Viet Cong.

All in all, it turned out that I wasn't in a great amount of danger but I was incredibly bored and started looking for other things to do. When I arrived there was no way of doing cultures for causative organisms of diseases and determining which antibiotics would be best for treating them. I built an incubator from a cardboard box, a light bulb and a thermometer, and then made up my own cultural media from outdated blood. The biggest problem was keeping the temperature in the range that the infective germs preferred, which was right around human body temperature. I contrived other little ways to expand the lab but there was a limit to what I could do with the equipment I had.

I drank a lot while off duty and occasionally took a day off and went with a fuel truck to see what they did. Those poor guys who drove the trucks were perpetually suffering from lack of sleep. They got up at five, then took until just before dark to make their fuel runs, and pulled guard duty at night. Medics were excused from guard duty for some reason. I never learned why but it was probably because our little unit didn't fall under the compound command. We were part of the Medical Brigade which encompassed all the medical units in Vietnam, but seldom saw anyone from higher levels of command.

The first run I took with a fuel tanker driver was almost the last thing I ever did. He was driving along the edge of a canyon at least a hundred feet deep. I noticed the truck was edging ever closer to the side of the road and the canyon. I looked over at the driver and he was sound asleep. I gasped and jumped for the steering wheel, grabbing and turning it just in time to keep us from plunging down into the ravine while shouting for him to wake the hell up. On the way back, I found a different driver to ride with, one more wide awake. Later on I was to learn that the guy who almost drove off the road was probably doped up, but I didn't suspect anything at the time. Alcohol was my drug of choice; I had no interest in drugs, but I eventually learned that I was in the minority. During my first tour those who did drugs mostly kept it concealed but by my second tour drug use was rampant and done almost openly, as if defying the Army to do anything about it.

Every now and then I would have one of the doctors write a prescription for medical alcohol, purportedly to perform lab tests with. Then we would get some juice from the chow hall and have a jungle juice party. The medics were always catered to and given whatever they asked for. We built a grill and got steaks from the cooks to barbecue. In return, we gave them penicillin pills to take prophylactically before sex.

I made friends with another sergeant in the dispensary named Greg and we hung around together. We usually ran together in the morning for exercise, circling the compound on the cleared area near the barbed wire, right where the Agent Orange had been applied, but we didn't know anything about the danger then. Greg became the only real close friend I made in the Army. I was still pretty much a loner, like I had been before entering the military. I began teaching Greg some lab techniques and Greg in turn taught me some of the finer points of diagnostic medicine. By this time in my career I had worked in surgery, the delivery room, on a ward, in the Emergency Room, in a surgical clinic, in pharmacy and in the laboratory. Greg was a pretty good jack leg medic. Between the two of us we had most things covered. It was a good thing, because our two doctors rarely bestirred themselves to see patients. I don't know what their problem was, other than resentment at having been drafted. They simply didn't want to work unless they had to. That was fine with us; taking care of the patients gave us something interesting to do. After a while, we decided to branch out.

In Vietnam there were what were called MEDCAP teams, (Medical Civic Action), designed to "win the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese. One day while out with the truck we found a pharmacy that was being disbanded and carried all their medicine back to the compound. We decided to start our own MedCap team. It was easy to find volunteers to come along and serve as security guards since it got them out of a fuel run. We would finish up sick call, strap on our .45 pistols, load up the jeep and truck with medicine and guards and drive out to isolated villages in the boonies and set up for business.

It was incredible, the range of illnesses we saw. There were terrible fungus infections, men and women walking around almost bloodless from heavy hookworm infestations, many different kinds of parasitic infections I had seen beforehand only in lab school and books, malaria, goiter, tuberculosis, pneumonia, untreated diabetes and infections all over their bodies from untreated and unsanitary care of wounds from accidents. I say accidents, but I imagine we treated a good many Viet Cong along the way, men and women both, for many women served as auxiliaries for the VC. The worst were the little kids with infections we could do little for other than give them tetracycline, which was the only antibiotic we had. For TB we rationed treatment to one bottle of pills for one patient, when normally we'd see a dozen with TB. We picked the one who looked as if they'd have the best chance of recovery and gave them the medicine since we had only a limited supply. The others got a shot of streptomycin, not much more than a palliative since they really needed a series of shots.

Many of the illnesses we saw could be cured or prevented by simple hygiene but so far as I could tell, there was no soap in the country among the Vietnamese. I wrote to my mother and asked her to write the local paper and ask for donations of soap. This was still in the early stages of the war when most of the folks back home were still very patriotic, and the response was tremendous. We received tons of soap, far more than we'd ever use. I spent most evenings drinking beer and writing thank you letters.

We could tell that the people in the villages we went to really appreciated us and liked us for trying to help them. We made friends at the hamlets where we set up and treated illnesses. One village in particular was run by a likable old Village Chief with a large family. He lived in the center of the cluster of huts in a large stone house, as compared to the flimsy thatched affairs the rest of the people occupied. When we showed up, he always insisted that Greg and I come into his house and have tea and talk with him through our interpreter, a Vietnamese lieutenant. It was enjoyable and educational. I really liked the old man and his wife and what I think was about a dozen of his kids, ranging from toddlers to teenagers.

Then came one of the worst days of my life. We were the only MedCap team in the area, even if we were renegades, doing it outside the auspices of the Army, and the Viet Cong apparently didn't like the way we impressed the villagers with our caring attitude. One day we set out, heading for the old Chief's village. I was looking forward to seeing and talking to him again. Strangely, there weren't any people moving around like there usually were when we arrived. No kids were playing in the muddy unpaved street. Puzzled, we drove on to the Chief's house—but there was no longer a house there. Knowing we were coming, possibly from information gained by VC compound workers, the Viet Cong had come in during the night and killed the chief and his whole family, kids and all, and blown up his house. There was nothing left but a pile of blackened rubble and the lingering stench of burned flesh. There was absolutely no one around anywhere. The whole village was as quiet as a graveyard at night. The silence was so eerie I felt chill bumps. I knew there must be someone watching us, but the only thing moving was a big old hog lying lazily in a puddle and a few hens scratching in the dusty street. We started to get out to see if there was anyone we could help, but then there came the sound of a shot from somewhere nearby. Greg and I looked at each other, then turned around and got out of there as quickly as we could.

The next day Mama-San told us what had happened. The Viet Cong had killed the chief and his family and blown up his house as a warning for us to stop our activities because the villagers were getting too friendly with us. I had heard of such things of course; they happened all the time in that war. But this happened to me. A whole family had been wiped out simply to teach me and Greg a lesson. All we had wanted to do was help the people, but our heartfelt assistance had resulted in a whole family, kids and all, getting killed, as well as the Vietnamese Army militia troops who stood guard at the Chief's home night and day. I felt absolutely horrible about it.

It wouldn't have helped if we had wanted to keep up with our activities. Word came down from on high: cease and desist. So with little choice, we did, and thereafter confined our activities to providing medical care to the workers on the compound.

I had been drinking before that incident, mainly out of boredom, but now I really started hitting it heavily. I couldn't get the images out of my mind, especially the thought of those happy little kids who had died because of me. And I started having awful nightmares over the incident, screaming and shouting in the night. Those nightmares followed me into civilian life and remain with me to this day.

I took R&R in Hawaii, meeting Connie there. I wanted her to tell me personally what was going on, and I also wanted a chance to see my youngest brother, Mike, who had joined the Navy a few years previously and whose ship was stationed in Hawaii. It was great seeing Mike, but I could tell from Connie's attitude that it was over with us, even though she wouldn't say so. It would have been a hell of a lot kinder had she just told me. War makes a person's mind work funny. By this time I certainly didn't love her, yet having a family back home was something to hang onto in the war zone.

The only mass casualties I saw during my first tour were not among the troops, but a gang of civilian workers who were filling sandbags from a red clay cliff. They undercut it so far back that one morning it collapsed, burying about two dozen of them and injuring many more. Our unit and ambulances from two other units at Long Binh responded. We managed to save a few, but basically, if they had been very far under the overhang, they died, either from trauma or suffocation. It took all day to finally dig the last ones out but our job was over with long before then. We simply hung around on the faint chance of a survivor, but after about ten o'clock in the morning, we found no one else alive.

I did see an example of mass hysteria one day. I was drawing blood from a group of Vietnamese women we were going to hire when one of them fainted. Another started screaming. Soon the whole group was screaming, hyperventilating and fainting. They dropped like flies, even though there was nothing at all wrong with them. It was simply a case of mass hysteria, as I said, but it certainly took a long time to get them settled down, and by the time we did the dispensary building reeked of ammonia from the capsules we broke under their noses to wake them up after they fainted.

There were some strange beliefs I found among the Vietnamese. For some reason, they thought that any blood they lost could never be replaced. It made things difficult when I had to draw blood from them. They would allow about a tenth of an ounce of blood to enter the syringe then go into hysterics and jerk loose if I tried taking any more.

I'll mention one other rather radical tactic Greg and I used with the Vietnamese the compound hired as laborers. Before allowing them to work in the chow hall or with any of our food, they had to be checked for parasites. At first I dutifully had them collect stool specimens and looked for parasites with my microscope. When I found them, they had to be treated, then re-examined to be sure the treatment had worked. Finally I got smart. Since they invariably had one parasite or another, we began to treat them first, for both amoeba and roundworms, and then examine them afterward. It saved a hell of a lot of labor and eye strain on my part from peering through the monocular microscope I used, which dated from back before WWII. Of course I did find tapeworms sometimes. The roundworm treatment wasn't effective for tapeworms.

Every soldier in Vietnam was issued anti-malarial tablets and made to take them. They caused diarrhea and upset stomachs in many of the troops, including me. I finally quit them altogether, but never contracted malaria, probably because the mosquitoes didn't like the taste of beer.

There was already a black market in Vietnam for Army supplies when I arrived, but it got progressively more active during my first tour, becoming blatant in fact. Just about anything the Army used found its way into the black market and was sold openly. So far as I know, no one ever tried to do anything about it, and frankly I doubt if it could have been stopped or even slowed down much anyway. Somehow black markets seem to accompany wars. The only thing I ever sold on the black market was the Army insect repellent which no one ever used, yet was issued as regularly as coffee was with breakfast.

The rest of my tour after the MedCap missions were cancelled was anticlimactic. I spent it holed up in my little ratty lab and in the evenings at the NCO "club" (a tent with handmade benches and no floor) drinking beer. Several times when the VC raked the compound with machine gun fire, I was so drunk I never knew it.

When my first tour was over, I found that not only did I no longer have a wife, but she had left Allan with me and taken off with her new husband-to-be. I can't say I blamed her much, and the fault for the split probably lies more with me than her. I guess she really loved me or she wouldn't have stuck around as long as she did. I hadn't been much of a husband to her, but it's hard to pay attention to a woman you no longer love--if I ever loved her to begin with.

I did my best with Allan, and Connie's grandmother came to El Paso to help me with him while I was stationed at a big general hospital at the base there. I was promoted again, Dad came and stayed with me for a while after Connie's grandmother left, then Connie came back and took Allan, meanwhile giving me divorce papers from Mexico to sign. I signed them and she quickly married her boyfriend. I never met him but he was apparently a pretty nice fellow. He did well by Allan while he and Connie were married, even setting him up with an educational fund for college. He could do that, being quite well off financially.

The only good thing that happened to me when I came home was that I missed the great Tet Offensive of 1968 in Vietnam. The compound I had been on was hit during the offensive, with more than machine gun fire that time. There were casualties but I never learned if any of the guys I had known were hurt or not.

I still had almost a year left on my enlistment. I worked nights by choice at the hospital so I could be by myself. I dated a few of the girls from the Women's Army Corps who worked at the hospital, but really didn't go out much. I had been married long enough that I had forgotten what little I knew about dating, which wasn't much to begin with.

One of the women I went out with was divorced from a doctor and fairly well off. After just a few dates, she told me "You remind me of a college boy the way you act around women." Perhaps I did—a college boy from her era, since she was five or six years older than me.

Making rounds to draw blood in the morning was sometimes traumatic, seeing head wound cases who would never be right again, men who had lost arms and legs and those still suffering from tropical diseases. It made me furious seeing all that suffering from a war the politicians kept supporting but obviously had no intention of trying to win. It was stupid. Nevertheless, I missed the relaxation of petty regulations that were ignored in a war zone, and I missed the combat pay because I still had all the bills to pay from the marriage with Connie. Eventually, I decided to volunteer for Vietnam again and a few months later I had my orders.

One more note here about the divorce. The Army didn't recognize the Mexican divorce even though our court system did. I continued to be paid as if I were married despite insisting to the paymaster that I wasn't. The additional money amounted to about 25% of my base pay. Finally I quit trying to not be paid the extra money and just took it. I felt no dishonesty; I had tried to get the extra pay off my record.

El Paso is right across the border from Mexico and a lot of the guys crossed the bridge every week to consort with the girls and party. All the time I was there I never went to Mexico. I had seen all of the hookers I wanted to see in Vietnam and they no longer held any interest for me. Maybe that was an indication I was maturing some.

The next section of memoirs will cover my second tour of Vietnam and my discharge from the Army, along with another marriage and another divorce.

Part Nine

In my last installment, I described my first year in Vietnam, returning home to a divorce and finally deciding to volunteer for a second tour.

Right before going back to Vietnam, I stopped in Dallas and visited with my sister and her family for a while. One night when I was out drinking, I began urinating almost pure blood. I was drunk enough that I ignored it, and it had tapered off some by the next day. I should have reported to the nearest military base to see what was wrong, but I was afraid I would be held up and not get to go back to Vietnam. Snooky (my sister) took me to her doctor at a combination hospital/clinic. The doctor told me all that was wrong was that a little artery had broken and that the bleeding would stop. It did. I didn't know it, but years later I would be right back at the same hospital/clinic, as an employee!

There was a rather funny incident that happened when I took my leave before going to California to be shipped to Vietnam again. My youngest brother, Michael, was stationed on the west coast. I called him and he agreed to take a leave as well. He could do it since he had also gotten divorced. A day or two later he was in El Paso. We spent a couple of days carousing while I waited on my final orders.

One day I happened to think how nice it would be if Gary could get a leave and come home, too. I forget now where he was stationed, but we called him. He said he'd love to come home with us but he couldn't afford it. I told him that if an officer (which he was now) couldn't afford a little plane ticket, we two poor enlisted men would pay for it. That did it. He applied for a leave.

Mike and I started for home, driving my new car, a Mercury Cougar. We stayed high on booze the whole drive from El Paso to Shreveport. When we ran out on a couple of occasions, we beat the bushes in small towns trying to find something to drink. This was Texas in the 60s and many counties were "dry," i.e., they didn't sell alcohol. We had loads of fun on the drive, then stopped in Dallas to see our oldest sister, Snooky. We talked her into coming with us, too.

That way, when we arrived in Shreveport, we had an impromptu family reunion because our other two sisters already lived there. Best as I remember, I enjoyed that leave more than any I ever had. We three brothers went out, drank, gambled and just had a fine old time and sobered up on Mother's great cooking. I hated for it to all end.

Gary made arrangements to take me up in his F-4, the fighter jet he was flying, so I guess he must have been stationed somewhere out west then. I don't really remember. I missed getting to take the flight because Connie called me, wanting to see me about something, then never showed up. I think I was waiting on her with Dad, who was working in Oak Creek Canyon in Arizona at the time, a beautiful place. I tried climbing the side of the canyon but gave out halfway up. Years later I would use that locale as the finale in one of my novels, Space Trails.

When I headed back to Vietnam for the second time, I didn't realize how much it had changed in only eight months, the time I had been gone. My first tour, I didn't hear many complaints, not even from draftees, but almost from the time I stepped out of the plane on my second time around, I could tell things were different from before.

For one thing, the great Tet Offensive of February 1968 had taken place while I was gone, but I never learned if anyone I knew was hurt. For another, there was more of the usual sniping and harassment from occasional machine guns than I remembered.

Tet of '68 was really the defining point of change in attitude toward the war. Before then, we heard a constant litany of how we were winning. Afterward, it was just the opposite. All I heard was not only that we couldn't win, but that the politicians weren't going to allow a win. That was a real morale buster for the troops. Who in hell wants to fight a war when you know in advance that so many limits have been placed on how and where the fighting takes place that there's no chance of winning?

By the middle of '68, it was more of a holding action. Peace talks were usually in the air, but for the grunts and flyers, the guys doing the bulk of the fighting and dying, it meant little. They knew, somehow, there wasn't going to be peace any time in the near future, not when the diplomats had started the conference by arguing about the shape of the conference table.

For my part, I had already decided to leave the Army, even though I had been promoted again right before leaving for my second tour, and was getting on up in the ranks where Army life is a bit more pleasant. In fact, I decided to get out the day after the G.I. Bill passed Congress and was signed by the president. I was still disgusted with myself for screwing up the best educational opportunity anyone could ask for: being paid to go to college. I was determined to leave the Army and try college again, this time without the amphetamines.

In the meantime, I was assigned to run the lab at the 17^th Field Hospital, up in the Vietnam Highlands at Anh Khe, home of the old Air Mobile Division, now given a numerical designation which I don't remember. I was familiar with the unit. It was also stationed in Georgia when I was. Once I had to participate in the recovery and identification of 19 bodies from a helicopter collision during training. It was such a gory mess that those of us who did the work were all given letters of commendation to go in our files.

The hospital tents, buildings and barracks of the 17^th Field Hospital were built right at the edge of the perimeter, up on the side of a mountain. Don't ask me why; usually the medical units were put as far away as possible from enemy action. I lived in the last barracks up the mountain before the jungle started. The perimeter was somewhere beyond there but I never saw it. The only thing visible was jungle, practically right out my front door. I guess Agent Orange hadn't arrived there yet. At night the blasting of boom boxes vied with screaming monkeys and other jungle noises in trying to spoil my sleep, except that it couldn't be spoiled because I usually spent every evening at the NCO club drinking beer and playing poker. Now I usually lost, but it was something to do. Besides, I was normally pretty well looped by the time I went to bed.

There really wasn't much for me to do there. My techs took care of all the work and the administrative tasks used up hardly any of my time. I became bored very quickly.

The only relief from boredom was "Sin City," the usual area beyond the perimeter where soldiers went to drink and carouse when they could get off duty. I could get off any time I had the money but I got tired of that, too. I did get some new equipment for the lab and got it set up, but that was about it. The only excitement was when we had a lot of casualties or when the occasional mortar round came into the base, but they usually aimed for the helicopters, a long way from the field hospital. Once the VC tried to break though the front gate but were quickly stopped. What I did more than anything else was sit in my office and read, or do the parasitology tests since that was something your eyes have to be trained for and I had much more experience at it than any of my techs.

A couple of months after I arrived for my second tour, my brother Gary came over for his first. He was still flying F-4 jets for the Marines. A lot of his flying was in close support work for Marines. As soon as I thought he had time to get settled down, I asked for a few days off to go up to Chu Lai and see him. This was in the far north, about thirty miles below Da Nang, a major city. The colonel in charge of the 17^th Field Hospital saw no reason why I should have time off to go to Chu Lai so I went and cried to the chaplain. Chaplains have lots of power in the Army. A few days later, the colonel called me into his office and told me I had been made an official courier. He handed me a briefcase full of official correspondence and gave me a list of persons I was to deliver it to, wait three days, then go pick up the replies and come back to Anh Khe.

Great news. A couple of days later I was aboard a C-54 on my way to Chu Lai. I arrived, found some transportation, delivered my correspondence, then finagled a ride from the airport out to Gary's unit. He met me and we had a fine time. Gary had enlisted in the Marines and then gone on to flight school. This was the first time I had seen him as an officer. He tells me he still has a vivid memory of me stopping and giving him a perfect, snappy salute. He thought it was a real class act.

He took me to the briefing for his only mission while I was there; he had been given a little time off, too. It was ironic in a way. During my first tour, a soldier had died from swallowing a toad frog while drunk to pay off a bet. He died from the toxins some toad frogs produce. Obviously the word hadn't gotten to the intelligence officers in Gary's unit who did the pre-flight briefing. My ears perked up when I heard him telling the pilots that if they got shot down and were hungry, they could eat toad frogs! I didn't feel like it was the place of an enlisted man from outside his unit to tell him how dangerous it could be, but I did tell Gary not to eat toad frogs in case he got shot down and ran out of food. (Later on he would go down, twice, but I'll relate that later.)

What Gary and I did mostly was drink and catch up on family news and other happenings and tell each other war stories. The picture below shows me on the right and Gary on the left.

I hated to go back to Anh Khe, but had no choice. I picked up the replies to the correspondence, then got drunk while waiting on a plane back and had my bag with all the official mail stolen, along with all my gear, too. Needless to say, the colonel wasn't very happy with me when I got back and told him I had lost all the replies to his letters. After that he quickly agreed to my request to be transferred to Da Nang a month later. He probably wanted to get rid of me by then.

Some time after I was transferred to Da Nang, the 17^th Field Hospital was attacked. A squad of Viet Cong broke through and ran down the row of enlisted barracks right where I had been sleeping when I was there, tossing grenades into them. Then they went on a shooting rampage. Had I stayed there, I would have been on the receiving end of one of the grenades, since I slept in the NCO room at the entrance of the very first barracks in the line, protected only by thin plywood walls. The VC went on to hit the nurses quarters and other parts of the hospital before a reaction team killed them all. I read that some nurses and other medical personnel were killed. Again, I had lucked out, leaving a unit just before it got its worst attack of the war.

At Da Nang, I was assigned to the 95^th Evac Hospital, the very same outfit I had been with in Georgia. There I did have a lot of work to do, seven days a week, usually in microbiology looking for malaria or amoeba parasites from sick soldiers. And I found plenty. The area was plagued with the amoebas which cause amoebic dysentery, a sometimes fatal disease, and malaria of the worst species was rife in the area.

When I wasn't working, I was at the NCO club drinking. I had a girlfriend in Sin City I saw once a week or so. Pot use was rampant among the draftees and some of the senior men as well. I wasn't all that familiar with pot before arriving at Da Nang but that quickly changed. Even some of the techs in the lab were smoking it on duty when they could sneak it in, and almost continuously off duty. I didn't indulge. As I'm sure readers have gathered by now, alcohol was my thing.

Gary got some time off and came up to Da Nang and saw me one time. We had a couple of days to do more or less what we had the other time we had gotten together, drink and talk. I didn't know it, or admit it, but we were both on our way to becoming way too dependent on alcohol. I already was, I'm sure, but Gary wasn't far behind. And of course we both smoked like chimneys. Our addictive genes were in full play already, while we were still in our 20s.

Da Nang was the home of the Marines, for the most part, although many other units were stationed there as well. They were the ones that got hit all the time with mortars and rockets. The hospital was well removed from most of the easy access routes to it, although we were on the edge of one narrow part of the perimeter where the VC possibly could have attacked. We had to pull guard duty. More about that in a minute.

We usually didn't see many of the dead Marines, although we had a little building that served as a morgue. The bodies were usually shipped out as quickly as possible, but from time to time an autopsy was requested, and I usually had to participate. I didn't particularly care for it, but it was part of my job. And then a lot of Marines began getting killed in the rocket attacks. They dug their bunkers deeper and sometimes they collapsed. And sometimes it was hard to tell whether the deaths had been caused from concussion or suffocation in collapsing bunkers from having too many protective sandbags piled on top. That's when one of the higher powers initiated a study to find out. Any time the Marines were hit and there was a collapsed bunker, the bodies were shipped to us for an autopsy.

During a particularly heavy period of enemy activity, our little makeshift morgue was filled with bodies. There was no air conditioning in it and only two autopsy tables. The bodies were piled on the floor until we were ready for them. It got to the point where, when we looked for the next body to autopsy, we actually had to walk on other bodies to find the one we wanted. This was a little much for me and everyone else, too, especially after one guy got in a hurry to get out of the morgue and pulled out the wrong body to ship home. The mix-up was caught just in time.

Fortunately, the fighting died down and the study was cancelled, but now I began having even more nightmares to go with the ones resulting from my first tour. Once I even dreamed I was having to autopsy relatives. It made me sick when I woke up. I was never so glad of anything as when the study was cancelled and the morgue was emptied, but the memories haunt me to this day. I hated the sight of so many young lives gone to waste.

I went to Australia on R&R for five days. It's a fine place and the people were extremely friendly. They still remembered us from WWII. All the partying tired me out, though. When senior NCOs were offered an extra day there for lack of enough transportation back to Vietnam, I turned it down.

I also went to Hong Kong. This was a result of a letter from my youngest brother, Mike, who was still in the Navy. He told me he was in trouble and planned on jumping ship in Hong Kong before it left for Vietnam again. And again, I went to the chaplain when my request for a five-day leave to go to Hong Kong to talk Mike out of it was refused. The chaplain came through again and a couple of days later I was off. Unfortunately, my brother had jumped ship in the Philippines and was in the brig there. I got the story later. He had become a binge drinker and a compulsive gambler. He eventually got mostly away from the booze, but the gambling was to haunt him for the rest of his life. He would no sooner get on his feet and have some money saved than he'd go on a binge and lose everything. Again, our addictive genes at work. I stayed in Hong Kong for five days. It is a very educational city. That's all I'll say about it here.

The pot smoking had gotten to the stage where even the guys on guard duty were smoking. One night only a few weeks before I was due to come home and be discharged from the Army, I caught a guy sleeping on guard duty when I made my rounds as Sergeant of the Guard. The smell of pot, which I had learned to recognize by then, was heavy in the air of the bunker. I chewed him out real good and told him to leave the pot alone and stay the hell awake. My next round, I found him asleep again. That was too much. I put someone else on his post and told the guy I was going to send him to Long Binh Jail, if not to prison.

However, I thought about it the rest of the night and realized my discharge would be held up if I had to stay and testify at his court-martial. That morning I told him I wasn't going to report him. He thanked me. I told him in no uncertain terms that I didn't want his stupid thanks and I hoped the VC came in and slit his throat the next time he jeopardized everyone by sleeping on guard duty. I don't know if he did or not, because I left for home three weeks later in February of 1969, a civilian after almost 13 years of military service.

I could have stayed in another seven years and retired, but the thought of going back to college and making up for that lost opportunity was the only thing on my mind. That, and the fact that the Army was deteriorating. Discipline was lax and it seemed as if every other person was high on pot or worse. Many of the men in the supply line, from generals on down to NCOs, were taking bribes from companies wanting to stock specific items in the exchanges and clubs.

While I was still at the 17^th Field, someone must have made a huge deal for Ballantine Beer. There were tons of the stuff and we had to drink a certain amount every night before the club would sell us anything else. First it was ten cents a can, then a nickel, then finally they had to give it away. It wasn't a very good beer, to put it mildly. I stayed away from all those deals. Once, I found out that a top NCO was involved, a man I had respected very highly up until then. Later on, some of them were caught and given dishonorable discharges and prison time, but there were very few caught compared to the amount of diddling with supplies that went on all through the war.

I was discharged in Seattle Washington, in February, with six inches of snow on the ground. We all had to trudge around outside and stand in line at various buildings for processing. At the financial processing, I was overpaid by well over a thousand dollars. I told several different clerks they were making a mistake but they insisted their figures were right. Finally I gave up arguing and took the money. I kept it in the bank for over a year in case the mistake was found but it never was and I finally spent it.

I must have been so cold from standing out in the snow that I misunderstood when I was given a Veteran's Administration card entitling me to medical care. For more than 25 years I thought only indigent veterans were given free medical care. This was to cost me a pretty penny later on.

We were all measured, then dressed in Class A uniforms to leave the post in. I was glad to get out of the Army. I left the overcoat on the plane. I left my jacket with the hash marks, ribbons and overseas bars in the cab I took from the airport in Dallas to my sister's home, and disposed of the rest of my Army uniforms and clothing there. Years later, I would regret throwing away my field jacket with its nice warm liner, but that's another story.

I stayed in Dallas for a few days, then returned to Shreveport and stayed with the folks a couple of weeks. I found a job as a lab tech at one of the hospitals in Shreveport and moved into an apartment. Before long I began dating the chief dietician at the hospital, an affair that went off and on both before and after (but not during) my next marriage.

I started college at the new campus of LSU at Shreveport in the summer session of 1969. With my job at the hospital and the G.I. Bill paying the college costs, I got along pretty well, although I was never able to save any money. On the other hand, I studied dutifully and made very good grades.

I made a couple of friends in the lab and dated the dietician (who had practically thrown herself at me), but had little to do with anyone on campus. After being married for six years, I had forgotten what little I knew of the dating routines, and the blasted shyness that still plagued me kept me from approaching several very attractive and intelligent girls in my college classes. I was later to learn, after I had married, that many of those same girls had been keenly interested in me and wanted me to approach them.

1969 was when protests against the war were reaching their height. There were "peace rallies" downtown and in parks, but usually poorly attended. Several times leaders of the peace movement tried to get demonstrations started on campus but had no success. In the South, in the redneck area of northern Louisiana, the population was still very patriotic. I did notice one very significant factor, to me anyway. Not a single one of the peace activists who appeared on campus had been anywhere close to Vietnam. They were involved in a movement where they didn't know beans about the country where the war was being fought. I wish I could have taken them back to Vietnam with me and shown them all the good people I met who were glad to have us there. It was the brutal Viet Cong cadre who intimidated the population, like killing the village chief and family where I had been giving medical care as an example to make me stay away. For some reason, the peace activists never mentioned brutalities by the VC or North Vietnamese. It was always the Americans who were the bad guys. I won't argue the pros and cons of the war, but I will say I think there were a hell of a lot of cowards doing the protesting or running off to Sweden or Canada when their draft notices came up. I could respect the ones who stayed and took their medicine for not reporting to the draft; it was the ones who ran I had no sympathy for.

The hospital laboratory I worked in was an enjoyable job. I liked the men and women there, the pay was good—I was paid as much as a graduate medical technologist after six months—and I had assurance I could fit my work hours around my college classes. We usually went out to eat at lunch. I got to know dern near every restaurant in Shreveport. I generally picked a place where I could have a beer or two with lunch. I figured I could have that much without impairing my ability at work, and apparently the others did, too. Most of us had a drink at lunch from time to time.

Some of the college courses I had to take for a degree in medical technology were snaps for me, like parasitology and microbiology. Others, like organic chemistry and physics, gave me a hard time, mainly because of my deficiency in high school math. All I had to go on was one algebra course taken years ago. I took the same course again to help me, Beginning Algebra, but the lack of geometry and trigonometry that other students had in high school hurt.

Another nice thing about the hospital was all the nurses—except I was too bashful to ask most of them for a date. Mostly I had an on again off again affair with the dietician. Then one day in a hospital corridor a young nurse looked at me with obvious interest. I found out who she was and called her and we began dating. She was only 18 years old, 11 years younger than me, a Vocational Nurse at the hospital. (The dietician and I couldn't get along and were in an "off again" phase). We had known each other only a few weeks when we married. By the time the wedding day came, I was already having second thoughts, but to my discredit, I went through with the ceremony, and afterwards really tried to make the marriage work. It was a lost cause, though. We had nothing in common other than our son, Randy, born in 1971, the year before I graduated.

Meanwhile, I continued with school, but it turned out I couldn't get a Medical Technology degree at LSUS in Shreveport as I had hoped. We had bought a trailer and had to move it to Northeast Louisiana University where I finished my last year. There was one amusing thing that happened there. I was given credit for the requirement of a year-long internship because of my year-long Advanced Lab School I had graduated from in the Army, but that used up the last of my transferable credits. Suddenly I found out that I, a 32-year-old man, had to take two credits in Physical Education! I chose body conditioning and weight lifting and barely passed either of them, mostly because I rarely went to classes. I should have taken bowling or something easy! Personally, I think requiring grown adults to take physical education is silly.

During the last semester Pam took the trailer and moved back to Shreveport where we intended to settle. She had a good job offer at the hospital where I was still working part time. I would hitchhike the hundred miles back and forth each weekend, work straight through the weekend, then hitchhike back, sometimes arriving just in time for my first Monday class. It was grueling. I had to spend a lot of time studying organic chemistry and physics and some of the other tough courses required for my degree. I stayed at a rooming house and hitched rides to school each day, or walked, since Pam had to have the car.

Finally I graduated from college, the first and only one of us six kids to do so. Mother came with me, and Pam, and Henry Kellogg. I drank beer all that evening and by the time the graduation ceremonies started I was a little wobbly. Also, I hadn't attended the rehearsal and didn't know exactly what I was supposed to do. I went the wrong way once, then tried to lead the ones behind me back to the wrong row after receiving my diploma. But I did graduate, by golly, finally making up for that lost opportunity I'd had in the Army.

The next part will begin after receiving my degree and cover the next few years of my life, including another divorce, a jump into administration in the Medical Laboratory field and a bad case of itchy feet.

Part Ten

I said before that I would tell about my brother Gary going down in his F-4. Actually he went down twice. The first time it was over the ocean, and he and his partner were rescued with no problems, although it was a rather hairy experience with a plane on fire that still had a load of fuel. I didn't even hear about this one until later on.

The second time came after I had left the Army and was just getting ready to start my first semester in college. One of my sisters (I don't remember which) called me and said that Gary had been shot down and had been hurt. It was my duty to go and notify Mother and Jim. It was a hard thing to do, knowing how much she had worried during the several years all three of us boys were involved with the war in Vietnam. It was in the evening. I went over and went inside. I think Mother knew something was wrong just from my expression. All the way over, I kept rehearsing how I would do it with the least impact on Mother. Finally I decided to start by telling her right off, "Gary has been hurt, but he's going to be fine." She kind of looked at me, not quite comprehending at first. I had made sure I was very close to her when I said it. Then I told her he had been hurt while he was shot down. She wavered on her feet but I was right there to ease her into her chair and give her the few details I knew. I hadn't wanted to start off by telling her to sit down first because that would have just scared hell out of her without giving her any information. All in all I guess I did it the best way I could.

After getting my degree, I continued working at the same hospital I had been at since leaving the Army, but now I was a degreed Medical Technologist rather than a technician. The change in title didn't mean much so far as my work went, but it did mean a nice raise.

The lab was known for its parties and its hard working but hard partying techs, both male and female. It was a good job that enabled me to buy a house and get Pam and me out of the trailer.

I worked mostly in the chemistry and microbiology departments, both of which I liked, although I preferred microbiology because it didn't have so many instruments that could go wrong and need repairing or adjusting. As I've said, I'm not mechanically inclined. Once in the chemistry department, I tried all day to get an instrument to feed water into the mix of serum for some particular tests. I took everything I could apart and put it back together numerous times and never could find what was wrong. Finally I gave up and called for a technician to come to the lab and repair the instrument. It took him only 15 seconds to see the problem. The heavy bottle of water was sitting on a section of the little rubber tubing that took water from the bottle and fed it into the mix. The water bottle compressed the tubing so that no water could flow. Problem solved. I felt very silly. The technician just laughed and said he had seen worse mistakes than that. It made me feel a little better, but not much.

My second son, Randy, was born in 1971. By the fall of '72, Pam and I were heavily in debt from buying a house full of furniture and a new car to replace the lemon I had bought new not long before. I was working extra to pay the bills and had little time to spend at home. When I was off, all I wanted to do was relax and drink some beer and get some rest. Our marriage finally failed over that issue, but it was really only one of many. The main point of contention was that we were so different and had so little in common. When the split came, in October of '72, it was because I refused to go somewhere with Pam after working two weeks straight and being on call and having to work nights as well part of that time. She said if I didn't go, she was leaving. I said "leave," and that was that. It was just the finalization of a marriage that wasn't working anyway.

There were certainly no assets to divide. I agreed to assume all the debts and to pay child support for Randy, which I did faithfully until he was 18. In the meantime, I moved back into an apartment, with the only piece of furniture a television set. I had Randy every other weekend. We slept together on a pallet on the floor. One of the female techs at work made me a couple of big floor pillows. I had an on and off romance with the same tech for a couple of years, as well as with the dietician mentioned in the last segment, but neither ever worked out.

In '73, my boss, a power in the medical lab field in Shreveport, recommended me for the position of Lab Director at another hospital, one of the old ones owned by society doctors. I didn't know that, but Mother did. She was very impressed.

This was my first job supervising a laboratory since getting my degree, which made me eligible for the position. I tackled the new job and got the lab into the best shape it had been in for many a year. I was good at the job of supervising a lab but it took less than six months to get all the hard work done, and I began getting bored. I just don't care for a job where I have little to do. I like to work and I was working in a field I enjoyed, but I couldn't see the point of me going into the lab and doing bench work while one of my techs sat with nothing to do. Also, I found I didn't fit in at the hospital despite the nice salary. I had no friends there and was uncomfortable with the high society doctors and administrators, all from the same families. I didn't know how to talk to them unless it was strictly business and once I had the lab humming, there wasn't much occasion to discuss the job.

This was still the time when no blacks worked as medical technologists, nurses, or Licensed Vocational Nurses (known as Licensed Practical Nurses in most other states) in Shreveport. In many ways, it was still like it had been in the 50s and 60s. One of the black maids (the only kind then in Shreveport) at the hospital wanted to better herself. She was a high school graduate and a bright girl. I brought her into the lab and began training her to draw blood and do some of the simpler lab work, with the eventual goal of getting her certified as a Clinical Lab Assistant. Soon, I was forced to fire her. As one of the society doctors said, "I don't want a maid drawing blood from my patients." I guess he didn't stop to think that she was a maid because that was the only job she was allowed to hold in the hospital until I came along.

Needless to say, I was uncomfortable with the administrators of the hospital, and they with me. I didn't know how to act around them and usually avoided them, even in the lunch room in the special section set aside for department supervisors. I usually went out to eat. It was just as well we didn't get along socially because we soon parted ways anyhow.

The lab tech I had been dating at the other hospital aggravated me so much that one day I used that as an excuse and left my job. I was unhappy with it anyway and my itchy feet were calling. I drove to California, where my youngest brother Mike was living. He had married again. I only stayed three days, just long enough to find out I had to be licensed by the state of California before I could work there and that it took at least 30 days to get certified. Besides, the long drive had tamed the aggravation I felt to a large degree and I really didn't want to stay in California. I turned around and drove back toward Shreveport, but stopped in Dallas, where my oldest sister, Snooky, lived with her family.

Within a few days I found a job in Dallas as Chief Technologist at the same hospital where I had been examined for bloody urine right before leaving for Vietnam on my second tour.

This hospital was in a rather rough section of south Dallas known as Oak Cliff. To give you an idea, our microscopes were locked to the cabinets with chains. One morning right before I arrived for work, three men with sawed-off shotguns came in and robbed the hospital cashier in the main lobby. Yup, rough neighborhood. In addition to the hospital lab, I was responsible for three other small doctors' labs in clinics in small towns south of Oak Cliff, and a chemistry lab across the street. It was still an easy job except for the difficulty in finding good help in that neighborhood. One time I found that a female technician I hired for the chemistry lab across the street was also working as a prostitute from there on weekends. Almost every day, after parking in the big mall next to the hospital (it had no parking lot), I was accosted by men wanting to sell stolen goods as soon as they saw my jacket and tie. A rough neighborhood.

I convinced the administrator that the hematology section was badly in need of upgrading. We purchased an instrument costing $50,000.00, which meant I got to go to a technical school in Florida to learn how to use it. There were two really neat things about going to the week-long school situated in the Florida Keys. One was that I was the only male in a class of 11 females, and they all liked to party after school. I thought I must be getting old, because the night after our last day of school the girls finally wore me out. I was with two of them in the hotel lounge at ten that night and suddenly all the drinking and partying and lack of sleep caught up with me. I paid the bill and left to get some rest. It sure was fun, though. The other neat thing is that I took several days of vacation after the school and traveled to Daytona Beach, where I and stayed with Greg, my best friend from Vietnam. You can see his name in the dedication of my book, Medics Wild. His wife introduced me to a female friend from New York who was visiting. I learned that I'd only thought I was finished with partying. By the time I got back to Dallas, I was perfectly content to go home to bed early for a week or two.

I stayed in Dallas for eight months. When I went back to Shreveport to visit, the lab director of the hospital I'd worked at while going to school asked if I wanted to come back. I did; I was glad to get away from that hospital in Dallas.

It seemed like old times in Shreveport. I was dating the dietician again and the lab tech again and working right back where I'd started from when I'd left the Army. It was nice to be able to see Randy often again, too, but I stayed less than a year before getting itchy feet again. Itchy feet and the same feeling of dissatisfaction and loneliness that had haunted me from puberty on. In a way, I felt sort of like a lost soul; I just couldn't be happy anywhere. I wasn't even doing any writing, and hadn't since Connie left me. I don't know why; it was something I enjoyed, but there was nothing inside me impelling me to write at the time.

I was going through a difficult period when nothing satisfied me, neither work nor female company. It all seemed shallow, or perhaps it was my life that seemed shallow. I wasn't ready for marriage again, but being single wasn't all that much fun either. I didn't have the type of personality that liked the singles' dating scene. Really, I didn't know what I wanted, but whatever it was, I kept looking. I only stayed in Shreveport for six months.

When I left Shreveport, I went back to Dallas. I wasn't ready to go to work as a plain old technologist again but there were no Chief Tech jobs open in Dallas at the time. I checked in at the hospital in the rough neighborhood in Oak Cliff again. They wanted me back so badly that they hired me and put me in a position over the Chief Tech they already had. I was called "Lab Coordinator," still in charge of the little clinic labs, the hospital lab and the chemistry lab across the street. I had a new title but the neighborhood had only gotten worse.

All this time, I was gradually paying off the debts Pam and I had rung up while married. I could easily have declared bankruptcy, but I had been brought up to pay my bills and I did. Besides, I had already been through exactly the same thing when Connie and I divorced, so I knew I could do it if I kept working and kept paying the debts down. It didn't leave me with much but so long as I had enough money to drink on and an occasional date, it didn't bother me. After all, I had grown up poor. This wasn't nearly as bad.

Finally I thought maybe a change of professions would help me settle down. I started looking, but the only thing I was really qualified for was the medical laboratory. Eventually I decided to try sales. I answered an ad which was deviously worded and turned into a sneaky come-on. Lacking enough common sense and still almost as naïve as a child, I got sucked into trying to be an insurance salesman. The people running the ad and sales pitch were really slick. They even had a psychologist there to mislead me and all the others who answered the ad. Only gradually, over a period of three days, did they let us know it was insurance we would be selling. By then, all enthused, I had already quit my job and was ready to try it. I even bought a new car with all the money they said I would be making.

Well, needless to say, it was a bust. I lasted almost a month before I saw I was no insurance salesman. Heck, I was spending as much money on gas traveling all over west Texas as I made from commissions. I tried a couple of other sales jobs with the same dismal results, only worse. Finally, I realized what a crazy idea trying to be a salesman had been. It simply wouldn't work for someone as withdrawn, non-talkative, and uncomfortable with new people as I am.

I began looking for another job as Chief Tech. I answered a couple of ads and had interviews at two hospitals, one of them all the way at the southern tip of Texas, in Brownsville. I almost got a job at one hospital as Chief Tech but I think I blew it after the interview when the hospital administrator and assistant administrator took me over to a club for a drink. Being nervous and uncomfortable, I downed two double rums and Cokes. I think that lost me the job right there.

And now I was running low on money. I answered another ad in Conroe, Texas for a Chief Tech position. I went down for an interview. It went off favorably, and I waited. I was called back a second time to talk to the pathologist who hadn't been there at the first interview. And then I waited some more, with money getting lower and lower. I think there was a big debate between the administrator and pathologist about my frequent moves in the past, but other than that I had some very good recommendations and referrals, even from the society hospital I had left without giving notice. Nevertheless, I couldn't wait much longer. I packed all my worldly goods, set a date for my electricity and phone to be turned off and waited. I planned on going back to Shreveport and staying with the folks for a while if I hadn't heard from the hospital by that date.

The day came and still no word. I had the grand total of a little over a hundred dollars to my name, a new car payment coming up, and many other bills due, including child support.

At nine o'clock that morning of the last day, I phoned the administrator and told him I could wait until noon, but no longer (because my phone and electricity were both going to be turned off) and I needed an answer. He said he'd call me back. So I sat there in the bare apartment, watching the hours, then the minutes ticking away. At a quarter of twelve, he called and said "Well, Mr. Bain, it looks as if you're the man." I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Little did I know, I had come within 15 minutes of missing out on the most important and momentous event of my life—and it wasn't the job. I'll keep you guessing about what it was for a minute or two until I tell how it occurred.

The moving pay I received was a godsend. It gave me enough money to rent a furnished apartment, pay the most pressing bills, and just enough left over to last until my first payday.

I reported for work October the 17^th, 1976. The lab was badly in need of some direction and I threw myself into the job, working long hours and dating hardly at all, even though there were lots of very pretty nurses, clerks, and other female personnel at the hospital. It was run by the county and a lot of politics were always at the forefront of any important decisions, but I'll skip most of that. I simply concentrated on getting the lab organized according to my ideas, getting the techs some decent pay, bringing in new equipment, setting up a supply inventory and giving the place a thorough cleaning and having housekeeping haul off tons of unused stuff that had been accumulating for years. I even had the lab remodeled. I got most of the pressing items done within a month or two, although there was plenty left to do there and always would be. It was a busy place in a rapidly growing city.

Now for the momentous event I almost missed. It was late November or early December and I was in the Intensive Care Unit, drawing some arterial blood from a patient. I looked across the bed and on the other side was a very attractive nurse, somewhere near my own age. Something clicked immediately. I still have an extremely sharp, vivid image of seeing her across from me. It is every bit as fresh in my mind today as it was at that moment.

For you see, I didn't know it yet, but I had just seen my future wife and the one and only true love of my life, the woman who would finally put my mind at ease and satisfy my yearning for some sort of stability, and for the first time in my life I would have a relationship with a woman I would never tire of, never stop loving, never lose interest in and grow to love so much that even today, 30 years later, the feeling is more intense than ever. Almost every morning when I get up, Betty is still sleeping and I'll stand beside the bed and look at her and smile, thinking of how much I love her and how enormously glad I am that it's her in our bed instead of anyone else in the world. And to think I came within 15 minutes of missing out on that!

However, it wasn't a case of love at first sight for me. It was more in the nature of something that gradually grew into love. There were some bumps along the way before we married, all of my own stupid doing. I came close to losing her before we were even married. I can look back and shudder at how idiotic I was sometimes (and probably still am today, now and then).

So let's leave it here for now. I'll continue to talk about Betty in the next segment, and how I contrived to meet her, and some of the things that happened during the year before we married.

Oh, yes. Here's a word of advice for anyone who's thinking of changing jobs: find your new one before giving notice! You might not wind up being as lucky as I was!

Part Eleven

Meeting and marrying Betty made such a huge difference in my life that I'm going to devote this complete installment to describing her, our marriage, and events shortly before and afterward.

Meeting Betty was such an important event in my life that I'll repeat how it happened here. I had been working as Chief Technologist at the hospital in Conroe only a month or so, when one day I had to go to ICU to draw some arterial blood from a patient. While I was busy with this, I looked up and saw a nurse on the other side of the bed from me. I still carry that image of her in my mind, just as sharp and vivid today as it was then. I decided immediately that I wanted to meet her, and contrived a little trick to do so.

First, of course, I asked one of my techs who she was, and from the description got her name. It was the Christmas season, so I attached a sprig of mistletoe above the entrance to the lab, then I called ICU and asked to speak to her. When she answered I told her who I was, then I told her that the last time she brought a specimen to the lab she had signed it in wrong and I needed her to come correct her mistake. Well, of course Betty couldn't imagine what kind of mistake she had made, so she came rushing to the lab to find out. And of course I was waiting under the mistletoe. I pointed up to it, and when she looked up, I gave her a brief but enthusiastic kiss. She was startled, but didn't appear displeased. I can't remember what either of us said, but I remember us smiling at each other. Later on she told me that if she hadn't been so surprised, she would have been more enthusiastic. However, the way I remember it, she was pretty enthusiastic as it was! She had already seen me around the hospital.

Our next meeting was a few weeks later. I invited her to come to the lab Christmas party which was being held in the game room of the apartment complex where I was living. She had to go to work early the next morning, but she did drop by. And I'm afraid I was a bad host to everyone else who came to the party, because soon after Betty arrived we went outside. From there we wound up in one of our cars (I forget which one) and spent an hour or so just talking and smooching until she had to leave. It was VERY enjoyable. During the few short intervals when we weren't kissing I learned that Betty was a widow. Her husband had died when he was only 41 years old. Betty had used the insurance money to put herself through nursing school; not just the R.N. school but the full course, leading to a B.S. in Nursing.

New Year's Eve was just around the bend. Being new to the area and spending a lot of hours in the lab getting it running the way I wanted it to run, I hadn't met any other women except Betty. I figured she already had a date for New Year's Eve, but told myself I had nothing to lose by asking, so I called and asked her if she'd like to spend New Year's Eve with me. She said yes, and suggested that I come over to her house. So I did, and brought champagne with me. That was our first date. We talked more this time than we had in the car and I found that she was eight years older than me. I had a hard time believing it because she looked so young. I admitted I had been married and divorced a couple of times. We also learned that we both loved to read. I still remember the first book I loaned her, The Cry And The Covenant, a fictional history of the great Hungarian obstetrician, Ignaz Semmelweis. And I remember the first book she loaned me; Burr, by Gore Vidal. We still have both books on our shelves, by the way.

For the next eight or nine months we dated off and on. I got to know other women at the hospital and got sort of involved with one or two, but every time I hadn't seen Betty for a while I'd start thinking of her again and call her. In the meantime, I had bought a townhouse on the lake. Betty was wanting to sell her home now that the kids were gone so she bought a townhouse in the same development, too. The only other woman I was seeing a lot of at the time was my own age, but that died out for reasons I won't get into here. Anyway, I began seeing more and more of Betty. I wasn't sure I was ready to get really serious, but I did anyway. I couldn't help myself.

Then just about the time I realized my feelings for Betty had somehow grown into something close to love, I was also seeing a 19-year-old girl, young enough to be my daughter, who was very pretty and had a lush figure but was sort of lacking in the intellectual department. I soon grew tired of her. That was my last fling, because when I compared her to Betty, she fell way, way short, not only in the way I felt about her as compared to the way I did about Betty, but in every other aspect as well. Betty was such a nice, pretty, caring, thoughtful woman that I dropped the young girl and began dating Betty alone.

Shortly after that is when I finally realized that I was irrevocably in love with Betty—somewhat to my surprise. It had come about so gradually that it snuck up on me. I thought it over for a week or two, then decided to ask Betty to marry me. She turned me down the first time, thinking that our relative ages would make too great a difference, with her being eight years older than me. I had no qualms about it at all, though. I've never asked, but I sort of suspect she was a little concerned with my past history of failed marriages as well as the fact that I drank more than was good for me and smoked like the proverbial chimney. She might have been concerned about the perennial nightmares I have from my experiences in Vietnam as well.

I asked her to marry me again not long afterward (and maybe a third time—I don't remember exactly). When I told her this would be the last time I would ask her, she said yes. Actually, I almost certainly would have persisted, because by this time I was truly very much in love with her and realizing more all the time not only what a wonderful woman she was, but how well we suited each other. We set the date for New Year's Eve, exactly one year from our first real date.

We were married at her townhouse by a minister who was the father of my stepson-in-law. My son, Allan, was my best man. Randy was there, too, even though he was only five years old. Ironically, Pam had re-married, then divorced and by chance wound up working at the same hospital as Betty and I. How's that for coincidence?

When I look back and think of how close I came to letting Betty get away by seeing other women, I still shudder. I don't know why I was even thinking about seeing anyone else, other than the fact that I had finally lost some (but by no means all) of my shyness around the opposite sex and was enjoying varied companionship.

However, Betty must have seen something good in me because she kept dating me when I asked, even though I wasn't always a very nice person. I've often wondered what she saw in me because I was certainly different than her first husband. By all accounts she had had a really good marriage with him until he died so young from a heart attack. I'm not religious at all, whereas he was. He wasn't a heavy drinker nor did he smoke, and I'm pretty certain he was more sophisticated than me, able to get along easily with others while I'm never comfortable nor know what to say in a group. He was pretty much of a handyman while I hardly know which end of a hammer to use. I could go on, but basically, I was just glad Betty and I had fallen in love and kind of left it at that, mostly.

Even so, the question of what such a good, kind, lovable, wonderful woman saw in a rounder like me did sort of haunt me off and on over the years, especially when I did or said stupid things by failing to consider the consequences ahead of time, a character flaw in itself. However, just recently I ran across a quote which perhaps explains the question for me.

Despite us being in love, by the end of the second or third year she must have begun to wonder what on earth she had gotten herself into.

I quit my job at the county hospital shortly after we were married and Betty loyally followed me. We worked a few months at a hospital in Houston, commuting each day, then I changed jobs again, before really getting to know her parents and two daughters and a son very well and vice versa for my boys and parents. I know I must have been quite a contrast to her children's father, who was certainly a good man. I knew that without ever asking, simply by knowing Betty and the way she talked about him and the way the kids had been raised. I've never asked, but I think it took a few years before they fully accepted me and I was probably a little uncomfortable with them as well. However, Betty told me later that they totally supported her decision to marry me. What's really nice is that over the years, Betty's kids have become as close to me, and in some ways closer, than my own boys. I love them as much as if I were their biological father.

While looking for new jobs after quitting the county hospital where we worked when we married, we had applied for positions in Saudi Arabia and had a couple of interviews, but after a while it looked as if they had forgotten us. We quit the new jobs in Houston after only a couple of months when I was hired as the Chief Technologist at a hospital in Marshall, farther north in Texas, but only 20 or 30 miles from where my family lived. Betty was hired as the head nurse for one of the wards.

I had to leave Betty behind in Conroe while I reported to the job in Marshall. Right before we were due to leave, she had to have a complete hysterectomy and some complications prevented her from traveling for a few weeks.

I hadn't made any attempts at writing for a while. New jobs, new marriage and so forth kept me busy, and I don't know why, but I didn't have much interest in writing at the time.

One odd occurrence happened in Marshall that's worth mentioning. It's rather funny to tell now but I had mixed feelings at the time. One day while I was at work and Betty was home, my former wife Connie stopped by while on a trip, hoping to see me. Shortly after she left, Pam, my other ex-wife came by. I don't remember the reason for that. Anyway, I've never asked what they talked about.

I enjoyed the job in Marshall more than any other I've ever had. For one thing I began doing a lot of individual teaching, something I'm a fair hand at. I even got one woman, who had been in the lab as a dishwasher and cleaner, trained and upgraded to an EKG technician, doing all the electrocardiograms for the hospital. The only thing I didn't like about the job was having to be on call. There weren't enough techs there for me to avoid it. The problem was, I liked to have a drink or two or three when I came home in the evening, but usually I could figure on getting called out once or twice during the evening or night. It presented a conflict, drinking on the job. I still had two or three beers even when I was on call but usually managed to limit it to that.

The hospital administrator was very impressed with me, and Betty as well when she recovered and came up to join me and went to work. In addition, all the techs were really pleased with the way I ran the lab, which is always a nice feeling for a boss.

Everything was going pretty well, except financially. We had more outgo than income because of the townhouses. Then only four months later, after I'd moved us up there into a tiny apartment, we got the news that we'd both been accepted for positions at a military hospital in Saudi Arabia, me as Chief Tech and Betty as a nurse, of course.

In the meantime, the two townhouses were sitting empty with big payments due on them each month, which is why we had financial problems. I never did have much business sense. We both lost our down payments on the townhouses, and made payments on them for months in Marshall and after arriving in Saudi while they stayed empty. We couldn't even rent them. I finally said no more and decided to just let them go, whether it ruined our credit or not. I guess Betty might have really been wondering by then. She had gone from having a little money saved and her house paid for to being just about broke with me, with her only asset some land left to her by her former husband. Nevertheless, we were in love and she trusted me and I wanted to do just about anything to make her happy.

This is probably a good spot to note that everyone in my family took to Betty almost immediately, which I could certainly understand. Mother absolutely loved her. All my brothers and sisters thought she was the best thing that had ever happened to me, and I sure wouldn't argue about it, because she was.

Romance, Love and Marriage.

What makes a good marriage? How do you know you're in love? Here's my own opinion, and bear in mind this is written from a male viewpoint. I believe all relationships begin with falling in lust, not falling in love. Lust frequently gets mistaken for love at first, and if it lasts a while, also frequently leads to marriage. If it isn't true love, there's going to be some rocks and shoals ahead, perhaps divorce, perhaps divorce with bad feelings on both sides.

Lust will almost always fade, and settle into attraction. From there it can go two ways. It can continue to fade until there's not much sexual attraction, and thus not much basis for a continuing relationship. Ah, but if lust turns to love, it will still fade, but then reach a plateau. From there, if it's true love, the attraction will start building again and feelings for the other person will deepen. Over time, the sexual attraction gets better and better, though it's unlikely to ever reach the lust stage again. It gets better because you discover that you really care about the other person. You want to make them happy, and you're happy yourself. You get to the point where it's hard to imagine life without your partner. Their happiness, and the contentment of living together, becomes a primary focus of your life.

In other words, you're in love, and if you're in love, it only gets better with time. You don't mind the little idiosyncrasies of the other person. You love the closeness and you never lose the urge for sex with your partner. Love is funny. Looks may fade with the years, but the attraction only grows. Your partner's desires and wishes in life become as important as your own, if not more so. You want to share all the triumphs and good things that happen in life with him or her. You're always ready to commiserate and comfort when things don't go exactly right. Being in love is really wonderful, and gets even more wonderful as you age.

It took me a couple of bad marriages to realize all this. I mistook lust for love. I hope none of you readers ever do that, and I hope your current love life goes as well as mine has these last 30 years since I first saw Betty, then contrived to meet her under that mistletoe sprig. My love for her has grown and grown. I simply can't imagine life without her. She is absolutely the most wonderful woman in the world.

This is exactly the way it happened with me and Betty (from my viewpoint, anyway). It took me three or four years to really settle fully into married life, not that I ever stopped loving Betty, but remember, I hadn't had a good marriage before. I didn't know quite how to act. I'm grateful that Betty was able to be patient and overlook some of my faults while I got adjusted, and that made me love her all the more. She never complained, argued or disputed anything with me, and that's not because she's a doormat; far from it. She's simply loyal and loving and she won't argue about anything unless it's absolutely necessary, for which I'm exceedingly grateful after my other marriages, where arguments about drove me crazy. And she never chastised me when I did some rather stupid things, mostly while drinking. Again, this made me love her more. Even when opportunity presented itself, I was never unfaithful, and by the third or fourth year, the seven-year itch that most men experience was gone, and it never returned.

As the years passed, I realized more and more just how shallow my life had been before meeting, marrying and living with Betty. Her example made me a much better person than I might have been without her. I think her kids probably saw the changes in me over the years, too, though I've never asked. And obviously, Betty set a good example for them as well. They all accepted me into the family and I never heard a bad thing about me from any of them, (though some words might have been said in private at first), which of course helped make me able to take them into my heart just as I had Betty.

After we came back from Saudi Arabia, I found a job in Lufkin, Texas as Chief Tech. Ironically, the only thing we could find to rent in the fast growing city was a townhouse!

We stayed there only eight months, but one day I thought of the land that Betty still owned, 100 acres near Shepherd, about 60 miles north of Houston, and asked her if she'd be willing to sell 25 acres in order to finance a house so we could move there. I already had itchy feet again, but thinking of the land in that sparsely populated county of east Texas made me start thinking of my childhood in the country before Mother and Dad split up. I thought maybe if we moved there and built a house, I could settle down and quit dragging Betty all over the world.

Betty agreed, and in October of 1980 we moved into our new home.

There were still a few bumps to come, but that proved to be our last move.

This section was mostly about Betty, which I intended it to be in order to show what a profound impact she had on my life. Now, in the next segment, I'll go back and relate some things I skipped over, particularly our time in Saudi Arabia. I'll also get into how we fared in that area of Texas (and way out in the country) in the next couple of sections. Radical changes in our lifestyle were in our future; we just didn't know it yet.

Part Twelve

Anyone with a drinking problem who goes to Saudi Arabia thinking they'll be able to quit because alcohol is illegal in the country is in for a rude surprise. I wasn't thinking about quitting because I wasn't at the stage where I had to have a drink, but many people do sign up to work in the country with that idea. Most expatriates live in special housing sections set up for them and they are generally left to do whatever pleases them within their homes so long as they don't make big scenes. What that amounts to is that almost everyone we knew bought tons of grape juice and sugar and yeast on the local market and made their own wine. The authorities must know what goes on but they very carefully ignore it. Some places in the Kingdom were more lenient than others. At one compound I visited on business the expatriates were even growing pot openly.

The night we arrived in the putative desert, a downpour flooded everything in the area that was in a low place. They don't build for drainage because that sort of storm occurs so seldom; we just hit the jackpot the day we arrived. I remember little about the trip from the States to our new home. For one thing, I drank most of a fifth of rum during the flight over and in London where we stayed overnight. And jet lag really hit me hard. We were going to the northern part of the Kingdom, at a military base up near the Jordanian border, which meant another flight. We got to the base about ten that night and were no sooner taken to what would be our home than the rain began. We stayed awake until daylight then fell asleep.

Rather than trying to remember everything, I shall simply insert portions of a diary I kept most of the time we were in the country. I had forgotten all about it until 2006 when we were remodeling the office in our home and ran across it stuffed in the back of a drawer. It really brought back memories! Before that, though, I want to mention that I began writing again in Saudi Arabia in 1979 and have never really stopped since. The diary will give readers a good idea of how we lived the year in Saudi Arabia. However, Betty wrote a few pages in it several months after we got there (in fact, I didn't start writing it until a couple of months after arrival). It is rather disjointed, but since I just finished writing so much about her, maybe it's best to start off with her feelings, both before going and after we got there, starting back a little before we transferred to Marshall.

BETTY'S INSERT

This was where Betty's notes ended. She's not much of a writer—or I should say she isn't interested in writing as a hobby like me. Actually, she's very good and recently had some short pieces she wrote published. But now, let's pick up on my diary notations. Remember, these are just the high points; I'm not duplicating my whole diary!

DIARY EXCERPTS

We're here. We're elated. We're resentful over some things not being as we were told they would be. We hate the IRS (what else is new?). We're frustrated. We're hungry for bacon, and real booze and his and hers bathrooms and…how to really begin?

Emotions, feelings, attitudes. Everything is the same, yet wildly different. We drink just like we did in Texas—but we make our own booze. We have a car—but it's illegal for Betty to drive! We have friends, but most of them are British. We have a home with truly uncomfortable furniture—just like everyone else's. We have food, entertainment, work, transportation, weather and friends—but hardly any of it is like back home.

I'm skipping over those months prior to going to Saudi Arabia. Betty did a good job describing them and there's no need to repeat. I should mention that while Betty was married to her first husband they had spent seven years in Venezuela and enjoyed it. And of course I had traveled in the military and liked moving around. We both expected to enjoy our stay in Saudi Arabia.

One more note on happenings before leaving. We had to decide what to take and what to store. We decided on books over dishes (a good decision) and clothes over everything else but books (wrong decision). We were given a list of things we were supposed to buy and bring with us. Almost all of them were unnecessary, since they were either furnished or we could easily buy them there. They also called the night before we left and told us we had to remove the labels on any clothing bought from Sears. Naturally we were all packed. We unpacked and stayed up all night cutting labels off clothes—which also turned out to be unnecessary.

It took us six full days to get from Marshall to our final destination at two o'clock in the morning with jet lag so bad we were barely able to pronounce our names.

The stop in London on the way wasn't much fun. It was cold, wet, and the wrong time zone. We did do a little shopping and bought some books, a very wise decision, we found out later. My feet were cold the whole time in London. Our hotel had no hot water. We had our last drink there for a long time (we thought). On the flight to Saudi, some passengers sneaked some booze aboard and were falling down drunk when we arrived.

The recruiting office had done a fine job. No one knew we were coming. Once we hooked up with a corporation representative in Jeddah, we got an orientation but we were so tired we didn't care what was said. I couldn't get my razor to work. Breakfast the next morning. I asked for milk. It was served steaming hot. I asked for cold milk. The waiter brought one ice cube. I gave up and drank it warm. We slept on the flight to Tabuk, our final destination. Again, no one knew we were coming. We saw a little Arab holding up a sign with our corporation's name on it, so we went with him, taking a chance since he spoke no English. He deposited us at the Emergency Room of our hospital. The people inside wanted to know who we were and what we were doing arriving at that time of night. By this time we had already had a multitude of second thoughts about going to Saudi!

Someone took us to our villa. The lights weren't working. There was one bed with sheets on it. We collapsed and slept until ten the next morning when the phone rang, telling us we were supposed to have showed up at the personnel office at eight o'clock. We told them to give us an hour. We took a cold shower and had coffee and Cadbury's chocolate we had bought in London for breakfast. Jet lag was terrible. Someone gave us some Saudi money and took us to the commissary to buy food. We just selected at random. The ice cream wasn't worth eating. The milk was canned and tasted terrible. We were introduced to a lot of people but both of us were so tired and sleepy from jet lag we have no idea who we met that first day. We finally got some hot water that night. We went to work the next day but I remember very little of the first few days. I fell asleep at my desk several times. The food in the cafeteria wasn't very good and what we bought at the commissary wasn't either. We were on a forced crash diet.

The villa was furnished with the most godawful uncomfortable furniture I hope never to meet again. There was a washer but no dryer. However, the back yard did have a clothes line and they furnished the first batch of clothes pins, but no one could predict when the sand would start to blow. Many times Betty or I no sooner hung out clothes than we had to bring them back in and do them over.

The first night we were invited to my boss's home for dinner. They served homemade wine with the meal. The next night we went to someone else's home for a party. They served vodka and rum and had 40 liters of homemade wine on hand. I got the recipe and a few days later bought some five gallon jerry cans, some grape juice, sugar and yeast and got us some wine started. So much for no booze in Saudi Arabia.

I had 13 people working for me, mostly from various countries in the Middle East. Only one was trained to technical standards. The others were good on a monkey see, monkey do basis but had no theory at all.

We got a "starter kit" for the house. One set of sheets, one blanket, two towels, a teapot, two cups, two plates, two forks and spoons, one frying pan and one pot. We survived on that for four months waiting on our goods to arrive. Needless to say, we bought some things to make life a little easier.

The recruiters told us there would be a recreation center with a library, but they lied. It isn't open yet. It's a good thing we bought those extra books in London, but we still ran through all we had in a few weeks and started reading them again and frantically borrowing books from anyone who had them.

There is bus service to the hospital, but that doesn't cover standing out in a sandstorm waiting on it. A car isn't absolutely necessary, but life is lots more comfortable with one, if for no other reason than going shopping in Tabuk and going on vacation in Jordan.

Betty began working on the front yard with a hoe, scythe and shovel. No lawn mowers in the country, of course. The back yard is hopeless, all alkaline, salty sand.

Almost everyone here says they should write a book. I think we're the only ones even keeping a diary.

Our debt load is declining rapidly. There's nothing to spend money on here.

Our mail began arriving several weeks after we did. Everyone from home is worried about us and goes into all the turmoil in the Middle East. Actually, events outside the Kingdom seldom affect us.

This is one of the most conservative areas of the Kingdom. Almost all women wear the black clothes and veils covering them from head to foot.

The first letter I got from Randy asked, "Have you seen a camel yet?" Then it dawned on me—we hadn't! I guess the Saudis are so rich from the oil that they've all bought Toyota and Datsun trucks. Most of them drive like they're still on a camel, though. Traffic incredibly congested and they pay no attention to red lights or road signs.

Restrictions on female employees and family members are very strict. We have to sign papers saying we understand them, but a lot of the regulations aren't enforced. One thing they do enforce: no visiting Israel while on vacation! One person did and was thrown in jail then deported two days later.

The recreation center opened in March, six weeks after we arrived. Betty and I were ecstatic, mostly over the books we hadn't read in the library, such as it is. Not much of a selection but we were getting desperate. We'd practically memorized the books we brought with us.

Our household goods arrived three months after we did. We took a day off and unpacked. It was wonderful, seeing our books, linens, kitchenware and especially the big living room cushions to make this damn furniture more comfortable. I wired our twin beds together and crisscrossed the mattresses so we could sleep together. We didn't need the curtains the recruiters had told us to buy.

We use the center bedroom for our wine distillery. We threw an obligatory celebration party after our goods arrived. You celebrate if it gets there!

I discovered seven imperial gallons of pure ethyl alcohol in a neglected corner of the lab. With a little judicious help and paper shuffling it disappeared and reappeared in our house.

The pathologist took us to a resort area by the Red Sea. Before we left, we fixed them a good old fashioned country breakfast, substituting beef bacon for pork (none in the country), biscuits and gravy, eggs and hash browns. They had never eaten biscuits and gravy and got the recipe from Betty.

The supply situation here is worse than anything I've ever seen, even in Vietnam in a combat zone. Anywhere from six months to a year to get anything. Good old American efficiency. That's a standing joke with everyone, even Americans, and deserved. The corporation's management seems to go out of their way to hire idiots for all positions above department heads. Just incredible waste, confusion and inefficiency. After I set up an inventory system for the lab and showed the supply manager how many items were listed but not on hand and how many were on hand but not on the master inventory list, damned if he didn't ask me to apply for his job when he left. Said I could do it better than anyone they were likely to hire with supply "experience." Right now we can't do pregnancy tests or tests for syphilis, and we're even going to be out of blood typing serum in a couple of weeks, all because of idiots up above. Nothing I can do about it except submit emergency requisitions, which means it might arrive in three months rather than a year. Half the stuff I use is already expired!

We met some fellow Texans, Gordon and Marsha, one of the few other American couples here. The corporation hires British department heads if they can get them because they're cheaper. We've become good friends with them. All the British here make for some fun conversations, like "nappies" for diapers and "minced" for hamburger meat. We can barely understand some of the Cockney accents, and our Southern accents always make people laugh.

Gordon is an engineer and also a registered nurse. Also an alcoholic but a good guy. He set up a shortwave radio that caused a hilarious incident that I later turned into a story for one of my books. Gordon also has a real moonshine still in his extra bedroom.

A Saudi Army captain struck one of my female techs. The end result is he got in loads of trouble and in order to try getting out of it, me and the pathologist got invited to his house for a formal dinner. No women invited, of course. Very elaborate, coffee served first, then we all sat around on the floor on carpets and everyone ate from a central enormous platter with a whole roasted lamb on a bed of rice. We ate with our hands. Right hand only, of course. It was hard to remember not to use the left hand. A couple of days later, me and the pathologist and my tech met in a big room with dozens of his friends and he publicly apologized to my tech, probably the first time in a thousand years a Saudi male has apologized to a woman over anything. The end result was that the captain got busted down to second lieutenant anyway.

One nice thing here is the honesty. You can go shopping downtown, leave some stuff at the bus stop and go off shopping for more and return and it will be right there. Thieves get hands cut off. It sure teaches lessons!

Many of the Saudi enlisted men are very uneducated. One of Betty's cases was a man who tried pulling a tank with a truck. The chain broke and snapped forward, wiping out half his face.

Betty and I both saw our first case of scarlet fever and tetanus, caused by putting camel dung on the umbilical cord! I could tell stories of incidents like that all day from this diary.

I bought a used car. After three days of frustration trying to get it through the pile of regulations surrounding ownership of a car, I got smart and paid an Arab go-between a hundred dollars to do it for me. A day later I signed about a hundred forms and owned the car.

I stopped making payments on the townhouses. We're putting the money in the bank and hoping they sell for what's owed on them.

The Arab children are beautiful. Big black eyes, olive skin, finely chiseled features and curious as cats. Almost every day I have visitors in my office, little kids who've gotten away from their parents. They make me think of Randy. We do miss our families.

Betty is learning Arabic faster than me, mainly because she has to talk to patients. Mostly I sit in my office struggling to find a way, some way, to get supplies for the lab.

Betty has been promoted to Head Nurse of the male ward. A nice 4000 a year raise. Also, we sold the townhouses.

Yesterday was payday. Unfortunately, ours went to another city and theirs came here. American efficiency, no doubt.

From Jordan to Damascus is a highway of death. I was never so scared, not even in Vietnam!

The temporary pathologist arrived while we were gone. I don't like him. Finicky and thinks anyone not a doctor is beneath notice. Can't blame it on him being a "furriner." American doctors are just as bad in many cases. Humans are funny, ridiculous and pathetic. Also occasionally brave, honorable and admirable. There's always a few who can move above the crowd, but most of us can't see beyond the nose on our faces. Tragic but true.

I gave my lone student a quiz today. He passed with a B. I have to write all the study material, since the corporation overlooked that aspect of teaching. American expertise at work. If the training center ever opens, they had better get some teaching material in here!

One of my techs made a bad mistake in blood banking, the worst place for an error. I stay so busy with the fouled up supply situation that I seldom have the time to get into the bench work with the techs. I guess I'll have to set aside some time to write some lectures and give some lessons to them, too.

Gordon got drunk last night and cut his hair. Now he looks more like Willie Nelson and less like Howard Hughes in the last stages.

When something goes wrong in the lab, Betty's cohorts tell her to use her influence in the lab, and of course she does. In the States, we could solve most problems quickly, but here most of them derive from undertrained techs and lack of supplies. The nurses can complain all they like about us not doing pregnancy tests but you can't do them if you don't have the test kits. I guess I may have to raise some frogs or rabbits and go back to the 50s, like they did the tests then.

We bottled our last wine too soon. Every bottle opened boils over. (I wrote a story and sold it later about a male nurse who borrowed one of those bottles for a seduction scene. Total disaster!)

I'm gambling again, but mostly with the British, who can't play well so I usually win. It's always limit games so no real risk. Gordon is the only other American who plays.

I drink less here than I did in the States. Mostly the fun is in making the wine, not drinking it, and no one here will ever be a competitor to the California or French wines.

We had all my techs over to our house for a country breakfast. Took a lot of pictures and Betty really went all out, making that kind of breakfast for 13 people!

I wrote up a long list of suggestions on how to improve the payroll situation. Surprise! Administration approved it and sent it on to Jeddah to try to get my ideas implemented.

I applied for the job as Assistant Hospital Administrator. Another surprise. It was approved and is on the way to Jeddah for evaluation there.

I got drunk last night and think I made Betty mad at me for the first time since we've been married. I was trying to record a song and if anyone has ever heard me try to sing, they know why she got mad, since it was two in the morning. She came out and told me rather forcefully to GO TO BED! She is really good to me. Anyone else would probably have shot me.

Several events here. My promotion was approved. I'm the new Assistant Hospital Administrator. All the clinics are now under me. Funny to be ordering doctors around for a change. We took a trip to Aqaba with Gordon and Marsha, his wife. She and Betty got very ill. I drove all the way back with a terrific migraine. I'm sore and sick today from horseback riding, going to see Petra, a beautiful old Roman city. Horseback or walking are the only ways into it. I got laughed at—a Texan getting sore riding a horse? The people here think everyone in Texas goes around on horses and carries a six gun. I volunteered my blood for some research being done and damned if all my liver tests weren't off the board. I had to quit drinking for a while. Gordon told me, "You poor guy. Every day when you wake up, that's the best you'll feel all day." He has a weird sense of humor.

Betty has to have a sense of humor for her patients. One of them, a wealthy sheik, had a stroke. He offered the doctor millions of dollars to heal him so he could move his arm and couldn't understand why money couldn't cure him. When told of the exercises he'd have to do, he insisted on going home immediately, so his wives could do them for him. He has three. Another man, a diabetic, was naturally put on a diabetic diet while in the hospital. He couldn't understand why his family couldn't go buy him sweets.

I bought a beautiful brass replica of a 17th century matchlock musket. I paid $520 for it. The temperature was 142 degrees that day. I think the heat must have addled my brain to pay that much for the thing.

Gordon is always running down the Brits, jokingly of course. The other day he had a "Texas Independence Day" party. While it was going on, some Brits sneaked up, removed the trunk of his car and replaced it with one they had painted a Mexican flag on! Now he has to ransom his own trunk from them.

My new job is boring. Nothing to it. I like the money, though. We paid off three more bills completely last payday. We're spending $5000 on a two-week vacation in Thailand. The pressure to get away from this place and live like an American builds up after a while.

Betty is still having problems with her patients. The men won't listen to her and eat and drink before surgery, among other things. They're constantly disobeying her nursing instructions. She got really annoyed at the dumbness of her staff, too and burst out with "Ignorance breeds stupidity!" I think she's right, but not much to be done about it. She gets chewed out because of things they don't do or don't report.

Betty and a couple of nurses played poker with us this week, since some of the regulars were on vacation. She did better than me!

Non-alcoholic beer has been banned in the Kingdom. Detrimental to morality or something like that.

I'm getting scared to drive. There have been several deaths in the staff and their families lately from road accidents. The Arabs have no concept of safe driving. However, to be fair, Bangkok is just as bad.

The Mideasterners are no better at reconciling their religion with their behavior than Americans. They aren't supposed to steal, but they work the time clock like bandits and supplies disappear in quantities to rival what I saw in Vietnam.

My replacement in the lab runs it all right but makes enemies all over. No tact, like me. I try to keep things running smooth without making an ogre of myself.

Fourteen months to go and I could really care less if we got deported tomorrow. We're at a low point right now. Betty wanted to go home the other day when a foreign doctor let maggots stay on a burn for three days. When I took over housekeeping and the laundry I found them in such sad shape I hated to even tackle the problems. I suppose things might get better but it is intensely frustrating to work and work on problems and know you'll never see the end result of your efforts.

We bought a fifth of scotch to use for Christmas. It cost $50!

This may be my last entry. We have resigned. Betty came home the other day in tears—at noon. The crap had just built up to the breaking point and she finally got a bellyful. Patients spit on the wall, shit in the bed, and so forth. Worst is being treated as a second class citizen. I asked her if she wanted to go home and she said yes. I was SO glad! I'm ready to go, too.

We had a going home "vintage party." I had saved one bottle of wine out of each batch we made. We also cooked our Christmas turkey since we'll be leaving December 24^th.

We'll go home out of debt with a few thousand saved. We'd really have lots of money if we'd stay the other year, but it's not worth it. We want to be People again.

*****************************************************

That year in Saudi Arabia and the months before we departed for there went a long way toward making me realize what a wonderful woman I had married. I loved her before, but the way she took all the slings and arrows of fate and the way she handled my less than astute decisions on lots of things helped me realize she is one in a million. My love and admiration for her only grew from then on.

Betty and I returned from Saudi Arabia, working for a while at a hospital in Lufkin, then moved to the small town of Shepherd and built a home there, about 60 miles north of Houston, in a sparsely populated area of east Texas. We moved into the brand new house in October of 1980.

Both of us quickly found jobs in a hospital fairly close to home, me as a lab tech and Betty as a nurse. The remaining 75 acres of the land Betty had inherited were lying idle. Betty offered each of her three kids ten acres each. Mike, her only son, took her up on the offer immediately. He and his wife Linda elected the very back ten acres. I'll be forever grateful that Mike was around. He was working as a carpenter at the time, but he's one of those fellows who has a rare talent, an intuitive grasp of how almost anything mechanical works. He built the house for him and Linda, doing all the work himself. They lived in a little travel trailer while it was underway.

Carpentry work was hard to come by in the area, and we needed all kinds of things done around our new home: fences built, a barn built, land cleared, and a hundred other things that I had no idea of how to do. Mike was almost always handy and we hired him to help out. He taught me a lot about tools and building, but I never got really proficient, as anyone reading the books I wrote about that era will know.

Soon after we moved in, at the height of the 80s' oil boom, we signed an oil lease. That gave just enough money to buy a mid-sized tractor and all the implements needed on a farm. Well, it wasn't a farm yet, but I had visions of making it into one in my spare time. Fortunately, Betty and I both got seven day on and seven day off shifts, which worked real well. We always spent the days off chopping brush, repairing the road (and here I learned why most homes are built close to county roads—it takes an enormous amount of time and money to maintain a road and we had built a third of a mile off the blacktop). Over the years we've poured about $15,000 into that road, trying to keep it open.

Back to the tractor. When it was delivered, along with a brush hog, bulldozer blade, back end loader, auger and disk, I simply looked at all the strange pieces of machinery and wondered what I was supposed to do with them, how they worked and how in the heck to attach them. The delivery man kindly took ten minutes to show me how to hook up the brush hog, then quickly drove away, leaving me to learn everything else by myself.

It is an absolute mystery why I didn't seriously injure or kill myself while learning about the tractor and its attachments. I almost tore up the brush hog trying to mow trees instead of brush. I buried the auger so deep in the ground the tractor was rearing up on its hind legs. It took two days to dig it out. I tore my neck muscles looking over my shoulder while leveling the rocks (well, moving them around, anyway) that I was constantly buying and spreading on the road. And I injured my back all the time trying to hook and unhook those heavy pieces of machinery to and from the tractor.

I gradually learned, stopping frequently to buy some beer to ease my fears, but it wasn't easy. I came very close to turning the tractor over on me numerous times and once, after I learned to drag truck tires behind me to level the ground I had disked, a tire caught on a root and the tractor reared wayyyyyyyy, way up, with me hanging on for dear life and trying to find the emergency kill switch.

I won't go on. If you want to know more about it, read Life On Santa Claus Lane or Laughing All The Way.

Initially, we decided to become ranchers. We bought a few calves and they ran with the neighbor's herd. He was leasing our land for cattle grazing. He must have laughed himself silly on numerous occasions while watching me try to become a cowboy. It just didn't work. I never could get the hang of it, and besides, I was scared of cows! The third year, after having to haul water and hay in a sleet storm, I had had enough. I called our neighbor and sold our herd to him.

I was getting more and more interested in writing at this time, too. I wrote several short stories and part of a novel which Betty dutifully read. I'm thankful to this day that she didn't laugh at those efforts the way she should have. Not too long ago, I found them and I laughed! They were pretty pathetic. I did manage to salvage a few of the stories and turn them into salable pieces, but the partial novel was hopeless.

In the meantime, Betty had read an article about growing Christmas trees in Texas. It looked like a sure-fire, easy way to make lots of money for very little work. Like a perfect idiot, I plunged into it without doing any research at all. At first we planted 3,000 seedlings after I prepared one of the fields which had previously grown corn. You can read all about the Christmas trees in several books I wrote on the subject, Tales From A Texas Christmas Tree Farm, Laughing All The Way, Doggie Biscuit! and Life On Santa Claus Lane. The books describe perfectly how many times I made a fool of myself with tractors, trees, fences and other country ways of living while trying to make a Christmas tree farm. I tell myself that at least I provided plenty of laughs for the neighbors.

While the trees were growing (and turning into more and more work), the job at the hospital wasn't going well for me. I was just a regular tech, but I was the only one in the lab with a degree and a registry. When the Chief Tech got fired, I expected to be offered the job. Instead, it went to a young girl with only a high school education who had learned lab on the job. It was pretty much of an insult to me and I never really got over it. The reason I wasn't offered the job? I think the pathologist turned thumbs down on me, but I can't say for sure. Anyway, I didn't get the job. Then the hospital changed hands. The young girl committed suicide for reasons unknown. Again I was passed over for the Chief Tech's position. They went to an outsider and hired someone else. Again, they ticked me off by not offering me the job.

For a while I honestly tried to get along with the new Chief Tech, but me and the other techs thought he was making a laughing stock of the lab, even though the administrator still believed in him. One day the administration sent forms out to all the departments asking the worker bees to submit ideas on how they could better their departments. I took the matter to heart and said exactly what was needed in the lab and pulled no punches. The Chief Tech immediately fired me. (He was fired less than a year later by the same hospital administrator who hadn't given me the job).

I went to work across the street, running the lab for a doctor who I had spoken with on the phone but never met. Soon we came to terms and I began building him a good lab, even going so far as to get it registered, almost unheard of for a doctor's lab. I worked for him for four years, and did a couple of consulting jobs for him afterwards, but essentially, that was my last true salaried job, and my last salaried paycheck was in 1987. By this time I was pretty well burned out on medicine anyway and was having delusions of becoming the best and biggest Christmas tree farmer in Texas, as well as eventually making it as a writer.

The Christmas trees we had planted in 1981 kept growing despite all my blunders (which you can read about in the books mentioned above). People began coming out to buy trees before I even thought they were ready to sell. With Betty's consent, I gave notice to the doctor a year in advance and we invested heavily in clearing more land, planting more trees, buying more equipment, and trying hard to make it pay. Betty kept working as a nurse, but went into the Home Health side of nursing, starting as a visiting nurse and gradually working her way up into top administration. It's a good thing she began drawing the big paychecks, because I was spending it almost faster than she could earn it, trying to get the farm going. We joked that Betty had to keep working to support the farm, but that was just about the truth for several years. And Betty, even though working a full time job, helped a lot with the farm work, too, almost every weekend and vacation. I think she enjoyed most of it, though like me, she sure didn't care for getting out on cold mornings and planting seedlings—or getting out on cold mornings doing anything! We joked that we were fair weather farmers.

As it worked out, I usually got most of my farm work taken care of in the mornings if I could, then became a house husband in the afternoons. That required a lot of learning too, and I did have some help, a housekeeper who came once a week (off and on as we had the money to hire one). Sometimes it was all left to me, especially in the later years. The farm got bigger and took up more and more of my time. However, I learned to cook fairly well and wash clothes and so on. I only set the kitchen on fire once. It did about $15,000 in damage but fortunately the insurance covered it all. In fact, we hired Mike to do all the repairs and came out well ahead. After that when we got short of money I joked that it was time to set the kitchen on fire again.

Actually, we weren't that short on money—we just liked to spend it. Any time we got ahead, we remodeled the house or bought new furniture or took a good vacation or splurged on Christmas or... well, you get the idea. We could hardly stand to see money just lying around idle when there were so many things to spend it on. The farm itself, even those first years when we were really getting underway, provided a lot of neat tax deductions, so we wound up every year getting back five or six thousand dollars of Betty's money in tax refunds.

Remember I wrote that I didn't pay attention when I was discharged from the Army and given a VA card? For over ten years I bought my own medical insurance when I could have been going to a VA clinic! I think it cost 15 or 20 thousand dollars for my medical insurance that wasn't necessary!

Just about the time we had a profitable year, something terrible happened. My youngest son, Randy, got mixed up with drugs. (Actually he had had a long-standing drug problem, but since he lived with his mother, I wasn't aware of it.) He wound up being sentenced to 20 years in prison despite us spending a lot of money on a lawyer. (He got out on parole after ten years, but went back in for a parole violation after two years of freedom—the addictive gene that runs in my family got him again, this time with alcohol rather than drugs.) The whole thing was really devastating to me. He's a smart kid and I had high hopes for him. Maybe when he gets out next time he'll be able to stay out. I surely hope so. My other son, Allan, has done well after a few glitches. It would be nice to see him and Randy both more often, but with Randy in prison and Allan overseas most of the time, it just doesn't work out.

The farm years seemed to pass swiftly. We did build a first class Christmas tree farm, finally and after a lot of blunders on my part, and I continued trying to write. The hardest thing was that I couldn't type well, being self taught, and it took me forever to get a "clean" manuscript of one of my short stories ready to send off. I got rejections, naturally, but did manage to sell a few to small press magazines.

It was right about this time, in 1989, when I bought a computer, my first. It was a Radio Shack Tandy 1000X with 640 KB of RAM—that's Kilobytes, not Megabytes, to give you an idea of how long ago that was. Nevertheless, to me, the word processing program was like magic. The thing which had stymied me so much when trying to write fiction was all the mistakes I made typing. Now they could be corrected in a flash. As I said, it was like magic. I promptly wrote my first novel, The Pet Plague, and thereby found another way to get rid of money which I'll relate in the next section.

Another thing which happened about the same time I got my first computer is that Betty's daughter Pat came into the Christmas tree business with me after I assured her we could both make a living at it from the same location. This was another move made without doing a lot of research and another that wouldn't work out, although it did result in Pat and her husband Rob claiming their ten acres right behind our house and moving out to "The Farm." I didn't realize it when I was telling her we could both make a living with the trees, but the choose and cut Christmas tree market in east Texas had already peaked and was beginning its decline.

The next segment will tell about the agents from hell in the publishing industry and the beginning of the long decline in the Christmas tree field—and tell how I made another stupid mistake in that area while I continued making mistakes in dealing with a crooked literary agency. It will also show how stupidly stubborn and naïve I can be when I'm convinced a certain course of action is correct. If I would ever learn to listen to Betty....

Part Thirteen

If I would learn to listen to Betty in the first place I could have saved us both a lot of time, money and wasted effort on many occasions. I'm simply not practical minded, while she is. I don't know why she goes along with me, but she does, trusting that everything will work out right in the end. Let's take the writing first, since the whole project of these memoirs was in response to fans wanting to know more about my life, how I got into writing, and so forth.

After getting my first computer in 1989, a Tandy 1000X, I wrote my first novel, The Pet Plague. I had almost enough sense to know I'd have a better chance of getting it published if I had an agent. I had just purchased a book, Fiction Writer's Market, to find markets for the short stories I had been writing, and as I mentioned, had sold a few of them. I was beginning to think I could eventually succeed as a writer. The Fiction Writer's Market listed all the fiction markets in America, and also had a complete list of literary agents who had asked to be included in the book. There were hundreds upon hundreds of them.

How did I choose? I didn't have the slightest idea of who might make a good agent for my first novel, so I picked an agency at random, simply because I liked the sound of the name, Dorothy Deering Literary Agency. Actually it was a husband and wife team who were the "agents." As it turned out, I couldn't have made a worse choice had I deliberately set out to find the most crooked pair of scoundrels in the whole publishing industry. Charles and Dorothy Deering were scam artists, pure and simple, and I have to admit, they scammed me good—along with thousands and thousands of other prospective authors. Like most people who have been victims of this type of crook, after it's all over you wonder how you could ever have been so stupid to begin with.

Here's how it went.

I submitted the manuscript of The Pet Plague, the first novel I ever wrote, to the Deering Literary Agency. I received a reply telling me what a great story I had written and how they would very much like to represent me. The only catch was a $400 marketing fee. Not knowing any better, and after asking Betty about it, I paid, and the scam was on. At first I corresponded mostly to Dorothy Deering, but then Charles "Chuck" Deering became the man who talked so many of us into parting with our money. He had previously been a used car salesman, although he portrayed himself as a retired businessman.

The Deerings told me they were submitting The Pet Plague to all the big New York publishers, but in reality, they weren't sending it anywhere. However, Chuck was very persuasive and kept me on the hook for years. While he was telling me how "just any time" I could expect a contract with one of the big publishers, I wrote several other novels and paid a $300 reading fee for each of those. Like The Pet Plague, I thought my books were as good as many others I had seen published, even if they weren't on a par with Heinlein or Asimov or the like. Even Betty thought so. Eventually, Chuck talked me (and thousands of others) into signing a "co-publishing" contract with a publisher, whereby I would put up half the front money (about 5K), the publisher would put up the rest, 10,000 copies of the book would be published, and I would get all the first revenue until I had been paid back the front money, then would get a 15% share of revenues. Of course the whole thing was a farce. The "Publisher" never intended to publish anything; he took the money, paid the Deerings a kickback, and spent all the authors' hard-earned money on gambling trips to Reno.

In the meantime, as the "Publication Date" kept being pushed back and back, Chuck brought another "Publishing Company" into the Deerings' schemes, this one operating from Canada. It was essentially the same deal, this one for my novel, Medics Wild, only here I didn't have to put up as much money, only $3000. And this company actually published Medics Wild—but only printed 100 copies, not 10,000 as called for in the contract. And of course there was no distribution arrangement at all to get the book into bookstores. It was a scam, pure and simple, and I just didn't have the sense to see it—or was so enamored with having a book published that it blinded me to reality.

I set up a number of book signings and they did print another 200 copies, but those were the last. The company went "bankrupt" because the owner of the company had spent all the money we authors had paid him to build himself a fabulous new home, and in the meantime the bookstores were calling me and canceling book signings because they couldn't get copies of Medics Wild.

I finally saw the light (Betty had seen it a couple of years before, but I didn't listen to her) and split the blanket with the Deerings. The "Publishers" of The Pet Plague (which was never published by them) were sent to prison for mail fraud. The Deerings were also investigated by the FBI for mail fraud and they spent four years in prison, very hard years, I sincerely hope. The FBI agent who did the investigation which resulted in their conviction was so impressed with their scheme that he wrote a book about it himself and had it published. I recommend it to any author who is ever asked for money of any amount by any literary agent. The ones worth dealing with make their money from a percentage of your sales. (The title of the book about the Deerings, by the way, is Jim Fisher's Ten Percent of Nothing: The Case of the Literary Agent from Hell.) The Canadian "publisher" who printed the 300 copies of Medics Wild got off scot free.

At this point, I had spent a lot of Betty's and my own hard-earned money for nothing. I thought my writing career was ended before it really began. At the time, I had written a half dozen or so novels, all of which I thought, and other readers thought, were pretty good, and it seemed as if I had done all that work and spent all that money for absolutely nothing except a sad lesson. It was really a miserable feeling, having all your dreams, which had for years seemed to be close enough to touch, come crashing down and leaving you with nothing but an empty checkbook. However, Betty, bless her heart, didn't give me a hard time over it. In fact, she sympathized enough so that I managed to get on with life.

In the meantime, writing and farming wasn't all I did. Betty and I had fun just being with each other and we had kept in touch with Gordon and Marsha. After leaving Saudi Arabia, they had gone to Mexico and opened a country and western bar. They invited us to come see them and we did. Their place was in Cancun. We had a good time, marred only by me having a terrible hangover the first day and, being the first one up, I searched around for some hair of the dog. I found some vodka and what I thought was some sort of thick tomato juice in the refrigerator. I had finished off two drinks with the "tomato juice" when I started getting even more nauseated than I had been when I woke up. It turned out that it was actually some of Gordon's homemade barbeque sauce! That provided some laughs for years!

When the Peso was devalued, and the oil boom crashed, they went broke, having invested heavily in the stock market, mostly in oil stocks. They moved back to Texas, only 60 miles or so from us. Gordon worked for the prison system as a nurse and Marsha worked in the prison system as a school teacher. We continued to see them for years, while Gordon drank more and more. When he finally quit, it encouraged me to do the same. I quit smoking a year later, too, making Betty very happy.

During the first ten years on the farm, Betty and I got well acquainted with each other's families and before long it began to seem like I had known them all my life. We visited pretty often, usually playing a domino game called Forty-two.

Just as my dreams of becoming a writer were crashing down, the Christmas tree industry in Texas had peaked and was on its way down as well.

Pat, Betty's daughter, had come into the business with me, as I said earlier. We worked really hard but our sales topped out and the next year showed a precipitous decline.

I asked Betty about putting the farm up for sale to try to recover the money we had invested. It would also mean paying back Pat for the time and effort she had put in, and for her share of trees not yet ready for sale. Betty wasn't very enthusiastic, to say the least, but she did agree. We asked $295,000 for the 50-acre Christmas tree farm, the house, the trees and all the farm equipment. We got no takers, not even when, over the course of a year, we dropped the price down to $195,000. No takers. The industry was still going downhill. The trees were still growing and instead of simply abandoning them and finding a job like I should have done, I continued farming. I just couldn't bear to see all those trees go wild, or see all my hard, back-breaking toil go for nothing.

In the meantime, Pat dropped out of the business completely and resumed her college education. Rob, her husband, kept her share of the trees in fair condition. He ran a Christmas tree lot for either one or two years after Pat began school; I don't remember exactly, but we had already found out that running a Christmas tree lot isn't nearly the simple experience it sounds like. There's much, much more to it, and with competition from trees shipped from up north, the margin of profit was small.

It wound up with me selling what trees we had available, then selling some of Rob and Pat's trees for them. And each year, I still paid them a share of our profits, for four years, about the time it took for a tree to be ready to sell.

Once Pat was paid off, I continued farming and being a house husband, managing each year to make a profit but never that much. While I was at it, I continued writing. The difference now was that I was only writing short humorous pieces about funny things that happened on the farm (and with me doing the farming, there was no dearth of material)! Also, I tried picking up the pieces of the Deering Debacle by sending some of my novels to publishers. I got some nice letters back from editors, but ultimately, all of them were rejected.

Colleen, Betty's other daughter, was a school teacher. I sent the funny stories I wrote to her, among others. She passed them around at school and eventually started getting feedback. The consensus was that I should combine all the stories into a book. The teachers thought they were that good. I did just that, but again couldn't find a publisher. It didn't matter too much because I had the writing bug bad. I couldn't quit writing whether I sold anything or not. I continued writing shorts and did another novel or two, but thought I would never get much published.

And then something fortunate for me occurred: the arrival of the electronic book industry, where books could be read on computers, PDAs, personal computers, iPAQs and the like. I really knew nothing at all about it, but I had run across a place on the Internet where authors could post their work for prospective publishers to look at. Just for fun, I posted Life On Santa Claus Lane, the first collection of short stories about the farm. I didn't really expect anything to happen, but barely two days later, I had an e-mail from an electronic book publisher. The books were called e-books, and they wanted to publish Life On Santa Claus Lane. I decided to give it a try, and within a few weeks, they took several of my other novels. It was a royalties-only deal, no advance at all, but I was happy with any kind of legitimate deal after the Deerings!

The e-book market was still very small but my books sold, slowly at first, but then gained momentum. Unfortunately, the e-book audience grew slowly. At first my royalties were in the tens of dollars, giving Betty and I some laughs about the fortune I was making writing. I spread out to other publishers until I had a dozen books in "print." There were some glitches in the e-book industry as there will be in any kind of new enterprise. I had to withdraw from a couple of start-up publishers that didn't pay the royalties due me, but at least I hadn't lost anything but some time.

The real break came with publication of The Pet Plague, a science fiction novel—and the first novel I had ever written. By now most of the e-book publishers were also producing what was called "Print On Demand" paperback books along with the e-book editions. These were sold on Amazon.com and other on-line book companies, but it was hard for any author to get their POD books into the chain bookstores. Royalties were still small, but after The Pet Plague came out, my royalties suddenly were in the hundreds of dollars rather than the tens. I still had a long way to go before I would recover all the money I'd wasted with the Deerings, but at least I was making some money.

Then came my novel The Sex Gates, which took off like a meteor in the e-book field. I found what I thought was a good small publisher to put it out in print, but it turned out that the publisher wasn't that good after all. I finally had to withdraw the book for failure to pay all my royalties. Nevertheless, with the publication of The Sex Gates, my royalties suddenly jumped to the thousands, almost all from e-book sales. I found another small publisher for The Sex Gates, and it became a small science fiction cult classic, as well as winning an award for the best science fiction e-book of 2002.

Before I quite knew what was happening, I became one of the very best known and best selling authors in the e-book field. All my other books sold well, too and my name became somewhat of an icon for success in the new publishing paradigm. My books finaled for a number of e-book awards each year and sales continued to grow until I had earned back all the money I gave the Deerings and then some. Now every dollar I earned was profit. Well, after expenses, of course, but that just amounted to a new computer when the old one went too far out of date.

In the meantime, I was happy on the farm where I didn't have to deal with people so much, and truth be told, I was burned out on medicine, especially with the advent of AIDS. Back then we didn't use gloves to draw blood like they do now and the thought of contracting it scared me.

We took a number of vacations, sometimes with friends of Betty's from work, sometimes alone and sometimes with the kids. We visited my folks a couple of times a year and saw her parents even more frequently as they were closer. The high point was a reunion of both sides of my family at Wilhelmina Inn on top of Rich Mountain in Arkansas. I'm sure those folks will remember us for a long time—but I'm not sure they'd want to have us all back again! We were a pretty rowdy bunch. We had taken over most of the inn. I'm sure the few other tourists at the inn wondered what asylum the people in that part of Arkansas had escaped from.

The only thing marring my happiness was that Betty was having to do too much driving with her job, especially in the later years, along with having a few medical problems. And I was increasingly bothered with back problems as well as sensitivity to cold. I didn't know it at the time, but my exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam had caused me to develop diabetes and associated neuropathy of my feet and lower legs. It got to be really painful on cold mornings.

I had originally intended to keep the farm going well into my old age, as a supplement for our Social Security and as an adjunct to my earnings from writing, which any author will tell you are always problematical. I wasn't making a whole lot of money on the farm, but I was making a profit every year now, and the farm deductions helped get back some of the money Betty was paying in income taxes. Betty, being a few years older than me, retired first. I took my Social Security at 62 and managed to hold out on the farm for two more years, but that was it—I just couldn't handle it any more and it was the type of business where the owner had to do most of the work or the profits disappeared in wages.

Once Betty and I were both retired, we had to depend on my writing to supplement our social security checks, since neither of us had a private pension. I made just enough with writing to allow us to keep living pretty much as we had been and not have to dip into our savings. Several of my other books became worldwide best sellers as e-books: Strange Valley, Alien Infection and Mindwar. Alien Infection was also made into an audio book.

Betty had always read my stories but as I began making money from them, she got involved also, helping me with criticism and catching typos and mistakes. Our family also grew during these years until we had so many grandchildren and great grandchildren it was hard to keep up with them all. And my happiness with Betty continued to grow and grow, even though I always thought I couldn't possibly be happier or love her more than I already did. If there's anyone or anything ordering the universe, I'm forever grateful that it arranged for our paths to cross.

Part Fourteen

A great deal of the socializing in this area of the country is done at and through the churches. Since neither Betty nor I are churchgoers, that sort of limited our circle of friends, but we're both the type who can be happy with each other and our families and don't need a lot of other people around us. And as I said, our family grew! With two of her kids and families living on the "farm" with us on their ten acres, we never lacked for company. And as grandparents will, we did some babysitting. We still do occasionally but we're getting a little old for rambunctious two- and three-year-olds. Our two little miniature dachshunds keep us as busy as kids do, we sometimes think.

And that brings up another member of our family. Betty and I had dogs and cats from the time we moved to the farm. During the first ten years or so, the cats lived in the house, but once we built the big front porch addition, they moved out onto the porch with the dogs. We usually had only one dog at a time but they were singularly unlucky. Something happened to one after the other. Then came Biscuit, a mid sized dachshund. I still don't know why we let him live in the house when none of our other dogs did. The only exception was a Chihuahua who came in at night during cold weather; otherwise he had a comfy spot under the porch.

Biscuit lived inside from the moment he came to live with us. He was by far the most intelligent dog I've ever seen. Before long, we were treating him almost like a child. He got into so many funny scrapes and did so many unusual things that I began a book about him. Before it was finished, in his fifth year, he died from complications of surgery for a ruptured disk. Betty and I cried for weeks, telling each other "he was only a dog," but it made no difference. It was like we had lost a child. Eventually I finished the book, titled it Doggie Biscuit! and it's sold steadily since, both as an e-book and in print. It even won me a spot on the television news in Shreveport. Now we have two miniature dachshunds living in the house with us, so we never lack for exercise or amusement—but lovable as they are, there will never be a replacement for Biscuit. When we were in line at the small animal clinic at Texas A&M with Biscuit, the lady behind us started mumbling as if we were crazy when we didn't blink an eyelash at the $2,500 surgery fee they wanted. Unfortunately, it didn't work. And I'm shedding tears as I write this, remembering.

We also lost a great grandson to SIDS one year and that took a long time to get over. Our parents grew old and passed away as is normal but they all lived to ripe old ages and enjoyed life to the end.

As for us—well, there's several things about getting old which aren't enjoyable. First and foremost is the fact that no matter how young you feel in your mind, your body just doesn't work like it used to—and sometimes parts of it won't work at all. Either that or parts malfunction in serious and often painful ways. Your skin wrinkles and sags here and there as if it's tired. Your hair turns gray and thins (if you have any hair left). Your tooth losses begin to mount up until you're chewing on just a few teeth or teeth you weren't born with. Your muscles are weaker and your joints ache.

All of the above is just a normal part of the aging process. It can be borne with dignity and even with a certain amount of amusement. It's the malfunctions which really bother you, sometimes as a result of things which happened long ago, like the Type II diabetes with associated and very painful peripheral neuropathy as a result of Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam. I also have degenerative back disease which is very painful, perhaps hereditary and perhaps as a result of carrying those 40- and 50-pound sacks of newspapers twice a day when I was a kid with still-growing spinal bones and cartilage. Or perhaps both. Betty has had her problems, too. She just recently had half her thyroid gland removed because of a tumor, fortunately non-malignant. She's parted company with her gall bladder and some female organs. We both developed high blood pressure and both of us have to diet.

Even the malfunctions and diseases and worn out parts of the body can be adjusted to by taking various medicines, dieting, exercising and so forth, but the fact remains, we're getting older and there's not a thing we can do about it. There's an up side, though. We're both retired and don't have to get up and go to work every morning. In fact, we can sleep til noon if we please (but I still get up at my regular old time of four o'clock in the morning. Some habits are hard to break). Financially, we're doing fine. What with both our Social Security checks, my Veteran's pension and the income from writing, we're actually able to maintain the same lifestyle we always have—and perhaps a bit above. Money isn't much of a problem. Having been born into poverty and seen the degrading and stultifying results of it in this country and overseas as well, I'm eternally grateful that we don't have to endure the indignities of an inadequate income in our twilight years.

We still have fun. We can still laugh at the world's foibles. We're still in love with each other after all these years, and a really good smooch every morning helps keep the fires burning, even if not at the rate of our younger selves.

The last few years I've written many novels and a lot of short stories. The shorts are something I got into again after writing only novels for a long time. I've found I really liked them and can do a much better job now than before. Writing is like any other profession. If you work at it, you get better. I'll probably continue with short stories the rest of my life, while the novels will come much slower than before, probably only one or two a year.

About eight years or nine years ago, in 1998 I think, I decided to part company with the demon rum. It wasn't hard at all—I had been slowing way down anyway, first banning hard liquor from the shelf when I saw I couldn't have it around without drinking too much of it. Next went wine, except for when Betty had it with me. Then I switched from regular to light beer. The breaking point came when I noticed it was taking less and less of even light beer to make me wobbly. That was it. I quit and didn't have another drink for two years. Since then, I drink hardly at all, and mainly it's sharing a glass or two of wine with Betty, or a very rare beer with one of the kids or grandkids.

The year after I quit drinking, I also quit smoking. I had tried before without success and had used all the usual methods: cold turkey, chewing gum, patches, cutting down gradually, etc. All of them worked. They just didn't keep working. I always went back. Then I began reading about a new aid to quitting, Nicotrol Inhalers. They were available only in Europe at the time but the idea sounded good to me, a little cartridge of nicotine vapor in a holder so you could inhale the vapor and go through the motions of smoking just as always. It was two years after I read about the Nicotrol Inhalers before they were approved for sale in the United States, and then only with a doctor's prescription. I tried them and they worked. I haven't had a cigarette in more than eight years.

However, the inhalers are still only available by prescription, and you have to buy a huge supply at one time, costing well over a hundred dollars. I think it borders on the criminal for the government not to allow this fine product to be sold over the counter. It works. I've been using them all this time. I use one cartridge (the equivalent of one cigarette) every four days, and only get the nicotine vapor, not the tar and other bad stuff. If the equivalent of the nicotine vapor only from one cigarette every four days will hurt anyone, then they were in sad shape to begin with. My lungs have cleared up, I feel better and every time I touch the little inhaler I cuss the government for not making them easily available to the masses. Grrrr.

Since living out here on the "farm," we've spent a lot of money remodeling the house. The last episode involved the office, which had already been converted from a two-car garage into an office. We changed the worn out indoor/outdoor carpet, disposed of my big desk and bought a new one, disposed of some chairs, rearranged the wiring, added more electrical outlets, changed some of the furniture and so on. There's two more items left. The first is a new office chair for me. The next is a new computer for me. If this sounds like I'm getting everything and Betty nothing, it's not so. She's already well into plans for remodeling the kitchen and we're saving the money for it.

We've had a garden every year since building our house here. At first we grew (or tried to grow) everything under the sun, but over the years the garden has shrunk, reduced by a row here or not planting this or that until we're down to just tomatoes, squash, new potatoes and radishes. It seems like I'm missing a vegetable but Betty is the gardener. I can't even do the tilling any more.

The carport we built for our cars after converting the garage into the office is full of lawn tractors and other odds and ends until we couldn't get a car under it even if it was a midget.

We've been through three hurricanes, the latest Rita in 2005. They aren't fun but we're far enough from the coast that we won't evacuate, not as long as our generator works.

I'm on my fourth computer (I think), with a new one on the horizon as soon as Microsoft brings out Vista.

I've written almost three dozen novels and about that many short stories in the last 15 years. Most of my sales are still in the electronic book market, but I can say that I've reached the very pinnacle of that market. Last year, 2005, I was named Author Of The Year by Fictionwise.com, the largest electronic bookstore of them all. And this was in competition with nationally known best selling authors (most books these days are available in electronic as well as print form). That was an honor I was very proud of. And—drum roll—very shortly my first hardcover novel, Savage Survival, will be on the market. I really wish I was in better physical shape to travel so I could do a lot of book signings, but I'm not so I may as well stop thinking about it. I'm really anxious to see how this book will do. Oh yes—in 2007, while this manuscript was with its editor, I won not one, but two Eppie Awards, the most prestigious award available in the e-book market. And a month ago, a well known best selling science fiction author asked me if I'd like to collaborate with him on a novel!

Whatever, I've realized my life long dream of becoming a writer. I have three dozen or so books out in e-book form and most of them are either in print or scheduled to come out in print as time goes on. I'm with a very fine and upcoming publisher for most of my print books and another one for most of my e-books although there's some overlap. I still may wind up becoming as well known for print books as I am for e-books, but even if not, I'm satisfied. Writing is a fine profession for retirement. Betty is happy with me and the house and garden and doggies and cooking. The only problem with the last is that she's too good a cook. We both have to watch ourselves to keep from eating too much.

I learned one thing about writing your memoirs. Unless you're utterly callous, they can never be complete. There's a whole lot of things that happened which I've left out for fear of hurting and/or embarrassing other people—or myself, for that matter. There's also lots left out that's very personal. Every couple has a part of their private life that they don't share with anyone else, not even their children or siblings, and that's as should be. I don't know what goes through the minds of some people who put everything they've ever done out for the world to see. The Internet and the crazy TV shows make this possible but it's not for us. We like to reserve our special shared moments for ourselves alone.

Another thing I learned is that I had forgotten a lot of things that happened, but writing about my life brought many of them back. Also, there's a lot that probably isn't the least bit interesting to anyone else, so I left those tidbits out as well. Still, I know I've skipped some things I would have included had I remembered, but I don't think I've left out anything major.

One of my sisters is in a nursing home and one of my brothers has had quintuple bypass surgery after a heart attack. Such events always remind us of our own mortality. We'll be gone all too soon ourselves, but hopefully not right away. There's nothing seriously life threatening wrong with either of us. We're hoping we can have at least another ten years in this house before we have to give it up, but the time is coming. Betty and I both hate the aging process. It's to the point now that our doggies might outlive us. Golden years, phooey!

If I've learned one thing in life it's that change is inevitable. However, you have to live a good many years for this to really sink in. Another thing I've learned is that a person has to stay fairly busy at something to keep their enjoyment of life going on and on. Right now I'm still writing, and Betty stays occupied with gardening and the yard and house, and of course we both travel this world and others through our books, and most of all, we have each other. Lately (and since I stopped writing at such a furious pace after winding up in ICU) we've been talking about finding something we both like to do to occupy part of our time. It's too bad I have such problems traveling. There are lots of places we'd like to see—I just don't want the pain and bother of getting there and back.

One nice thing about the computer age is that you can make friends over the Internet. I have a number of them who I've never met in person but they've become almost as close as family just through correspondence. I've even co-authored several books with people I've never met except electronically. Amazing.

Betty and I were talking recently of the changes we've seen just since we've been married, the second half of our adult lives. We've seen cell phones come into being and just about take over the world. Same for computers and the Internet. We've watched more and more families where both spouses work outside the home—and in turn this has driven the take-out food market to new heights.

We've also watched disasters. Mount St. Helens blowing its stack. The bombing in Oklahoma City. 9/11. The rise of terrorism. The present war in Iraq is the second war we've sat through. We've seen two space shuttle disasters. We've had our own personal disasters, deaths in the family and so on.

One thing I don't like is that my brothers and sisters and other relatives all live so far away that we rarely see them. Fortunately, Betty's kids and relatives are mostly close. It's nice having two of her kids and families living just up the road on the land she gave them. They're a great help as we get older and it's good to be able to see them so often.

I could go on and on, but I think it's about time to close. As I said at the beginning, my memoirs are the result of fans and readers of my books and stories wanting to know more about me. I sincerely hope I've met their expectations. Probably I've written far more about myself than they ever wanted to know.

For those who stayed with me all the way through, thanks for reading.

I have received much more mail from the original memoirs than I ever expected in my wildest dreams. I've answered them all and truly appreciate everyone who took the time to write to me. Some readers have been encouraged after reading my memoirs to write their own life stories for their descendents, and others have simply expressed thanks to me for telling of how life was back in the 40s and 50s in the Old South.

Yesterday I received I letter from a long lost nephew, my brother Mike's son. He said he stumbled across my website purely by accident, then read the memoirs. He told me he had learned more about our side of the family in half an hour of reading my memoirs than he had previously learned all his life! He and his dad have been sort of estranged for many years but he wrote a really nice letter to me and told me how he often though of all three of us brothers, and included his dad in the letter. I'm hoping now they'll be able to get back together, particularly since Mike is not in good shape at all medically. He's never really recovered after his heart attack and quintuple bypass surgery.

As a writer, I truly appreciate books and the effort authors put into their work. Betty and I are both great readers. We have about a thousand books we keep to read over and over again but we keep adding more and periodically have to have a house cleaning to thin them out. When we do, our local library is the usual beneficiary.

Once more, it's time to close. Enough. May you all have happy and prosperous lives and I wish you all happy reading for the rest of your days.