My Portfolio

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In my Freshman year I took Latin.  Teaching Latin to teenagers in Southeastern Kansas in the 1940’s had to be one of the most challenging jobs in Christendom.  The Roman Empire was farther from our world than the star Betelgeuse.  The school board, however, decreed that one year of Latin was...

Shrinks say that war heightens a man’s desire to be near a girl: As near as “possible”.  They say it comes from a primitive desire to preserve the species, to live beyond one’s own life, and from a war induced sense of our mortality.  Maybe that is what caused me to...

I knew I was caught but I was laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. And then the giant head turned around and...

I am a product of my era.

When I think back to those years during the 60's I had a very good life. Of course at the time I was probably self-centered and didn't realize how wonderful it was. Like most young people I was in a hurry to grow up. And I remember my father always telling...

I passed easily into second grade, but shortly after school began, we moved again.  This time onto a large tract of land about three miles east of Drumright that had oil wells scattered here and there on it. It was called the “Thomas Long Oil Lease.”    I don’t know why we...

We were now living in the fourth house we had occupied in the same number of years of my life.  This house sat on a dusty unpaved road on the eastern edge of Drumright, Oklahoma.  Calling it a “house” is a compliment. It was little more than a shack.  My Grandma...

In the rousing title song of the 1930’s musical “Oklahoma,” the cast sings of corn waving as high as an elephant’s eye - growing “right up to the sky.”  They conclude this joyous testimonial by exuberantly shouting “Oklahoma. . . .  OK!”   Good theater, and it may even have been true...

Late fifties and early sixties were "changing times." ....In lower school, the teachers that inspired me the most were the ones that encouraged that spark of sheer desire to solve difficult problems....It wasn't but a few days into the (Computer Science) class before I realized this was the subject for me.  It was so fun, I forgot the time of day. I spent hours and hours hanging around the computer labs working on those first programs.

What a grouse weekend! I went to stay at Coralie's house for the weekend, after school on Friday. Mrs Bevan calls me her 4th daughter now as I spend more weekend time at her house than at mine! We all went down to West Beach Surf Lifesaving Club for the Surfie...

Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE The Beatles concert last night was fantabulous !!!! We all wagged school yesterday (12th June) to stand in the crowd outside the Adelaide Town Hall, in our school uniforms, where they were welcomed to Adelaide by the Lord Mayor and Bob Francis who...

Mum was and still is a fantastic singer. She sang like Billy and Ella during her teens. Dad was all about Country music and sang like Ferlin, George and Hank. With 10 kids in the house they played music all the time, Mum on the piano and Dad on the guitar....

My mother was from a family of nine sisters and one brother. Uncle John was the first born. Can you imagine all those sisters coming one by one, and uncle John hoping he'd have a brother?  He had to have loved all of his sisters though as they were all so much...

I was seven years old.  My family and I were living in the fifth house we had occupied since I came as its sixth and last member.   The house, located on the Thomas Long Oil Lease, east of Drumright OK had been built as a temporary, “company” house for oil field...

Love Lifted Me In the late 1930's , when I was somewhere around seven or eight years old I had a friend named Jimmy Cargill who had an older sister about the same age as my sister Frances. Her name was Neva and, like Frances, she played the piano. But unlike...

The “Cat” climbed the steep West Virginia mountainside as effortlessly as if it were cruising across the plains of Kansas.   Its builders called it a Model D-8 but to the pipeline construction crews it was just a “Cat”.   Whatever it was called it was the most powerful crawler tractor made by...