My Portfolio

  This is not the best way to get rid of a goat!

Growing up in the country on a farm, I had driven tractors and trucks ever since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.  In fact, I don't recall when I didn't drive.  My first "real" car--even though it belonged to the family, was a two-toned Bel Air Chevrolet.  The body was a...

We were driving home, having spent the day enjoying a belated Thanksgiving holiday in Tulsa with my oldest brother, Robert, and his family.  The tires on Dad’s 1935 Dodge droned in harmony with its engine as it moved along at the stately, safe, 50 miles an hour Dad always chose.  Other...

At about the age of four, when we lived at 1728 Engle Avenue, Norfolk County, Virginia (now the City of Chesapeake), I would walk to the end of the road closest to Military Highway and wait for Daddy to come home from work. At that corner was a little convenience grocery...

When “the war” ended and after the wild celebrations ended, Americans released the breath they had been holding for four long years with an almost audible sigh.    Peace, prosperity, and an end to rationing came almost immediately.   No more denial.   Consumers were like sharks circling a chumming boat waiting for factories...

When I was a teen, I didn't even own a bicycle let alone a car. I had to borrow my younger sister's bicyle and that wasn't an easy thing to do. It was attached to her hip!  I was twenty years old when I first learned to drive. I was married...

One of the better jobs was delivering the Tulsa Daily Tribune to its subscribers in Caney.  Being a paperboy meant “being your own boss” and “making however much money you wanted to make” – or so the “recruiter” said when he was looking for a new paperboy.  Like many good build...

There was a lot of coming and going of employees in Caney’s cafes, but the line between “boy jobs" and "girl jobs" was clear and bright.  Boys washed dishes or cooked.   I was too young to be a cook, so I became a dishwasher in “Chet’s Café” on Fourth Street.  If...

Caney was located at the crossroads of two railroads.  The Santa Fe ran trains north and south while the Missouri and Pacific, the "MOP", brought trains from the East and West.  The Santa Fe had all the glamour.  It had "The Streamliner."  In the `40's most trains were pulled by steam...

Caney had a bowling alley unlike any bowling alley ever seen before or since.  It was in a storefront building on Fourth Street, our “Main Street” just east of Winkler’s Drug store.  It did a boomingly noisy business until television came along.  It also was a business where the owner didn’t...

Kansas, by law, was a dry state.  The only legal alcoholic beverage was 3.2 beer, so-called because its alcoholic content cannot exceed 3.2% of its total volume.  A person can become intoxicated drinking this beer but they have to work at it.   Oklahoma, which was only one mile south, was just...

The hike to the dam was a leisurely walk.  There were plenty of things along the way worth doing.   Those cone-shaped glass insulators found today in flea markets were sat on the crossbars of the telephone poles that alongside the railroad tracks. They shattered with a glorious display of shrapnel when...

In early times someone built a dam across the Caney River out west of town, just at the bottom of Standpipe Hill.  It was a rudimentary dam, not much different in construction from those which small boys to dam up rainwater that runs in street gutters.   That dam had only one...

Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE Dear Diary, Since Dad died in 1962, my life has changed in many ways. I don’t know how much alimony he paid, but just about everything is different now. I guess we were lucky as we have lived on Mum’s salary and have...

Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Unlike almost everyone I know, I didn’t encounter any inspirational teachers during my school years. As a Presbyterian, I was sent to Catholic schools from the age of 3 ½ when I became a monthly boarder at Star of the Sea in...

She said, "You were the good reader, weren''t you!"

I was a shy and somewhat serious kid, the kind most people don't recall being in their classes because we were all but invisible.  I would rather have died than speak up or call attention to myself in any way.  In the fourth grade, all that changed.   Until that year, my teachers...

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This is a tough one.  When this question came out it made me really have to stop and think.  I was EXTREMELY shy as a child but I loved school. My first grade teacher - Mrs. Howell - I was terrified of her.  At that time corproal punishment was allowed in...

As a child I lived in a tenement building at 548 Fox Street, near Southern Boulevard in the South Bronx, with my younger brothers and parents. School wasn't far away-- PS 25, at 811 E. 149th Street. My mom walked us to school in the morning, and I looked forward to...