The Neighborhood: Lessons and Light from My Youth

By Paul H. Price

Childhood is the very foundation of adulthood. The ideals and expressions of life we hold in our adulthood have their origins and rudiments in the ideals and expressions of life we encounter and gather and live out in our youth. Be they feelings of worth or worthlessness, the vigor and hope of making something of ourselves, or an acquiescence to the belief that things of consequence are beyond our reach, or the lens of optimism or of doubt with which we view our own existence, all have their budding and beginnings in the experiences, or lack of experiences, of our childhood. And growing up in the 1950s and 1960s was at a very unique convergence of circumstances of combined societal, economical, political, spiritual, and cultural seismic shifting perhaps unlike any other era. We were a nation barely emerging from decades of world-wide wars and economic ruin and social survival, trying now to find our footing and our own stride and our equilibrium and our very identity. Never were we more communally encased and even secure in, and at the same time struggling to break out of, our traditions, our superstitions, our ignorance, our fears, our limitations, and our collective innocence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665541930

Paul H. Price

The author was born and raised in Southeastern Idaho in the midst of the "Baby Boomer" generation and the uniqueness of the cultural and economical and societal seismic shifting that was the 1950s and 1960s. He has adeptly drawn on his own personal experiences and interwoven them with the multitude of extraordinary events and social traditions of that time He has been married to his wife Christine for 46 years and they are the parents of 7 children and they now have 9 grandchildren. He holds a Master's Degree in Education from California State University and is the author of three other books; Last Chance, Childhood Dying, and Spiritual Honesty.

Book preview

2021 Paul H. Price. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/20/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-4192-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-4191-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-4193-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021921526

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

To the loves of my life:

Christine, our children, and their children.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Wonders and Tutorings of Childhood

Chapter 2: The Harmonious Ruckus and Rhythm of The Neighborhood

Chapter 3: Boundaries, Routines, Fads, Cars, and Calls

Chapter 4: The Realities of Real Life

Chapter 5: Baseball and Other Feats of Strength

Chapter 6: Values, Friendships, Order, and Heroes

Chapter 7: Hanging Out, Pranks, Work, and Owning It

Chapter 8: Just Nothing Like Christmas

Chapter 9: Basketball, Pure and Simple

Chapter 10: Angst, Flaws, Mistakes, Girls, and Growing Up

Chapter 11: Life Lessons Learned in the Mountains

Chapter 12: Last Chance and the Doctrine of Fly Fishing

Chapter 13: Never a Dull Moment

Epilogue

Postscript

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

Childhood is the very foundation of adulthood. The ideals and expressions of life we hold in our adulthood have their origins and rudiments in the ideals and expressions of life we encounter and gather and live out in our youth. Be they feelings of worth or worthlessness, the vigor and hope of making something of ourselves, or an acquiescence to the belief that things of consequence are beyond our reach, or the lens of optimism or of doubt with which we view our own existence, all have their budding and beginnings in the experiences, or lack of experiences, of our childhood. And growing up in the 1950s and 1960s was at a very unique convergence of circumstances of combined societal, economical, political, spiritual, and cultural seismic shifting perhaps unlike any other era. We were a nation barely emerging from decades of world-wide wars and economic ruin and social survival, trying now to find our footing and our own stride and our equilibrium and our very identity. Never were we more communally encased and even secure in, and at the same time struggling to break out of, our traditions, our superstitions, our ignorance, our fears, our limitations, and our collective innocence.

Childhood experiences establish the very deference we give to authority, the degree of tolerance we have in the basic differences of others, our attitude towards mishap and misfortune, towards responsibility and indulgence, towards pursuits and their purposes, and all solidify almost permanently while we are young. The encounters and interactions not only with our peers, but with the adults in whom we place our trust to guide us, compose the posture and feelings we have about ourselves, our abilities, and the tendencies we have towards withdrawing or persevering in the matters of life. Virtually every position we encounter in adulthood we extrapolated and fundamentally played out in our childhood. The human experience is an experience of maturation. It is one of experience upon experience upon experience, each one reinforcing or removing the result before it. Each life, each childhood, is unique unto itself with no two playing out exactly the same. Each is its own journey and we can never be certain of its composition or its conclusion, yet they are all similar in their structure, their style, their schooling, and their sentiments. And our values and attitudes and self-worth develop unhesitatingly and become part of our character and spirit early in life, and both the good and the bad of it are very difficult to root out in our adulthood.

Perhaps the utmost factor in childhood is simply to be happy. To be happy being a child, to not have to prematurely bear adult dilemmas, to discover without trepidation the world around you and to enjoy the daylight and hold mystical the night. To have friends you cherish long into adulthood, to hold with incredible fondness the streets you roamed, the moments you remember, the sentiments that well up in you at certain seasons, places you adore, people you love, and activities you treasure. These are all Touchstones and Touchstones assemble and shape the very bedrock of our own lives. This is to have embedded in your soul an anthology of feelings and faces and sensations and sites that you simply call home. It’s where you matter. It’s where you belong. And virtually every aspect of adulthood is either sustained or undermined by our accumulated childhood. This is why we instinctively and repeatedly are drawn back to it, both the pleasant and the prejudicial, because it is foundational, it is directional, it is inspirational, it is repairable, and it is redeeming. To find resolve from the hurt and to reminisce on the joy is a healthy, helpful, healing remedy and it can keep us tethered to our moorings throughout the ever-changing currents and conditions and circumstances of life. Childhood is not merely a moment in time; it is the very footing for our adulthood. All else flows unremittingly from this resilient and far-reaching reservoir.

CHAPTER ONE

The Wonders and Tutorings of Childhood

45092.png

M y very first authentic memory, and by that I mean I have many fragmented glimpses of life previous to this event, but this is the beginning of what is real about my life, almost like the genesis of my days. Many of the earlier memories that come to me are stirred up from pictures or conversations which do arouse my recollection, but in some ways I feel a disconnection to the incident itself. I can remember it happening but almost as an outsider, watching from a distance. It is familiar, but not touchable. This specific event is where I begin participating, seemingly as lucid as if it occurred not too long ago. I remember actually being there, feeling the senses and perceiving the environment and the setting surrounding this particular experience.

I am sitting motionless in one of the chain-link and leather-strap swings outside Riverside Elementary School, on the west side of the building where the swings, monkey bars, teeter-totters, basketball and tetherball poles, merry-go-round, and a circular climbing cage are all situated on top of a considerable playground of hard, black asphalt. Playing on this unyielding playground was a little more of a challenge and a gamble back then, because simply stumbling or falling down, or the upside-down monkey bar hang which went awry, a kickball to the face or a tetherball smack-down, the swing spin which left you stumbling around or jumping out of the swings a little too late on your bailout attempt producing a nice face-plant, or a timed dash in between the swings which wasn’t always timed correctly, getting flung off of an out of control merry-go-round, or just being airmailed off of the teeter-totter was a little more painful and consequential than if it happened on say dirt or grass. I think too that kids were just a little tougher back in the day. Get banged up, throw on a band-aid, wipe the tears from your dirty face and move on. Many a time we would return to class or home with tiny gravel bits buried into the palms of our hands, torn knees in our jeans or scraped-up-skin-hanging-loose elbows. Mom stocked a sizeable supply of iodine, band-aids, iron-on knee patches, and pats on the head, and when all else failed, a little spit on the hem of her dress and you were cleaned up and ready again for battle… childhood.

As I sit there looking at the rows of windows along the brick and stone face of this mammoth building that was Riverside Elementary School, I am conscious that something is amiss, out of the norm, but I’m not entirely sure what it is. Children’s minds do not always quickly abstract or process the particulars they are confronted with. This day began with me telling Mom I didn’t want to go to school today. I probably said I wasn’t feeling well, which usually worked, but in reality I just wanted to go play with my friend Gordon. I am in the first grade and he was one of my classmates, and my friend. Gordon was a little chubby like me, had blonde hair which was always in a crew cut and he wore large-rimmed glasses. We sat next to each other in class and always joined up at recess and enjoyed playing together. He had just gotten a substantial set of plastic green army soldiers at his birthday party the day before, and green army soldiers were my favorite and I couldn’t stop thinking about them.

Not long after I told Mom I wasn’t up to school, I slipped out the backdoor, through the backyard, then the alley, and down the street. It was not really sneaky like, we were always coming and going without much permission and I never felt the need to deceive Mom. It wasn’t like scheming, I just wanted to go play that day and it seemed perfectly natural to me. There were ten of us children in our family and a gazillion neighborhood kids around and we were always roaming in and out of each other’s homes, playing or talking or just watching cartoons, and often at the end of the day my father would simply say, Shouldn’t some of you kids go home now? And whoever was left standing after the dust settled, he figured those were his and he would gather us around for family prayer and then off to bed. On occasion, one or two stray kids would get caught up in the evening dragnet ritual and would have to spend the night, but that was fine with us. Mom and Dad would rarely notice if there was an extra body or two concealed in amongst our crew. And summer sleepovers were a recurrent and highly anticipated affair with the frequent refrain of, Go ask your mom if you can sleepover, its okay with my mom!

I made my way to Gordon’s house, which was several blocks away and I knocked on the door fully anticipating that I would see Gordon and we would go inside and play with his army men, but instead his mom answered the door. She looked at me with some surprise and concern because it was a school day and Gordon was in school, where I should be. I guess in my mind I figured that if I wasn’t in school, neither would he be, because we certainly couldn’t play with the green army men while sitting in class. She then smiled at me and told me I needed to go back to school. So I did.

So I’m sitting in the school swing, out there by myself and not sure of what I should do. I could see my teacher inside walking back and forth along the row of windows as she taught my class, and then she caught sight of me outside on the swing. She stared at me for a moment with a perplexed glare at what she was seeing, then walked over to the window, pushed open the bottom half which swung outward, leaned halfway out and yelled, Paul, get in here! So I did. We were blessed with some terrific teachers at Riverside and for the most part they were patient and kind and dedicated to their craft. Mrs. Pearson, Mrs. Swanson, Mrs. Davenport, Mr. Dye, and Mr. Campbell (who had an ailment of his right arm which he always kept supported up against his side) among many others and one of my more memorable teachers was Mrs. South, who was really more of a disciplinarian, but you knew she cared about you. She was a petite, wiry, thin lady with short black hair and thick-rimmed glasses. She constantly carried a wide, sturdy yardstick which she used for things other than measuring. She was always smacking the chalkboard, smacking the wall, smacking her hip, smacking the back of your hand. You did what she told you to do.

When I got home after school let out, and we lived just a block away, Mom was outside looking for me. There wasn’t the panicky concern there is today, we pretty much came and went as we needed or wanted, but she thought I had been up in my room all day in bed. She asked me where I had been and I told her I had been at school. Her look was precious. Mom was searching her memory to see if she had excused me that day, or maybe it was the day before, or maybe it was my brother, or my sister… but she quickly concluded that all was well, so move on. And Mom was proficient at doing just that. Well, how was school? Good!

1.jpg

Riverside Elementary School was the epicenter of life in our neighborhood. It was a massive brick and stone, perfectly square grade-school building with a grand and pillared entrance at the front which faced the street to the east, and a more diminutive backdoor which led out to the playground to the west. Built in the early 1900s the school rested on an entire city block and was surrounded by middleclass homes filled with World War II Baby Boomers. There were children everywhere. The building itself sat on the northeast corner of this block with several bicycle racks positioned between the building and the street, along with a small section of patchwork grass trying to survive the constant traffic of kids and bikes. The northwest corner was the aforementioned playground and on the south and west sides of the property were two baseball diamonds, one larger than the other, and the outfields of both diamonds merged into each other, with a generous grassy area adjoining them. The north and east and south sides of the block were all lined with cottonwood and oak trees, but not the west side. The entire block was encircled with a sidewalk, with modest houses on all sides with their front doors all facing towards the school.

At Riverside, you graduated from grade to grade literally and physically. All the floors had a sizeable open common area in the center of that floor with all the classrooms construed around the perimeter, with their doors facing that spacious section and with interior windowed walls that lined the classrooms facing the outside of the building. The basement was for supplies and janitorial equipment and the restrooms, with the other floors all classrooms, connected by a substantial, wide, grand stairwell along the west wall. On the main floor were the rooms for the lower grades, with the Principal’s office centered in the middle next to the front entrance (we were taught the difference in the spelling of principal and principle is the principal is your pal). His office was slightly elevated above the other rooms requiring you to ascend a small flight of stairs which were encased by walls, in order to get to his office. James Peterson was our principal and he was a very pleasant, middle-aged man with jet-black hair which he combed straight back and slicked down. He had wide, black-rimmed glasses and always wore a tie and often a sweater vest that buttoned down the front. Being sent to the Principal’s office was not really much of an ordeal, for he would sit and talk with you very kindly and often handed out Tootsie Pops. I liked Mr. Peterson. He once saved my friend Gary’s life.

While in the sixth grade, Gary and I had volunteered one day to stay after school and clean erasers, which entailed wiping all the chalkboards in all the rooms and then taking all of the erasers down to the basement and depositing them into a deep, rectangular metal bin. We would then bang the erasers against the sides of that bin to remove the chalk dust, which was actually a very messy job, and then return them back to all the classrooms. Gary and I were upstairs in one of the rooms cleaning the boards and enjoying the Tootsie Pops Mr. Peterson had given us for volunteering, and we were laughing about something or another and somehow Gary suddenly and inadvertently inhaled his sucker down into his throat. Just that quickly, he was in peril. He could not breathe or talk and was struggling and choking and turning blue. I could see the end of the stick inside his opened mouth, but I could not grasp onto it. It scared me to death and is one of those vivid memories that have remained with me. So I simply starting screaming at the top of my lungs, because we were all alone and I had no inkling of what else to do. It was a dreadful emotion watching him choking and gagging and franticly glaring at me. Then suddenly, Mr. Peterson came running into the room. He grabbed Gary and slammed him across one of the desks and began pounding, and I mean beating on his back. Out popped the sucker onto the floor. It took us both a few minutes to calm down and he then stayed and helped us finish up with cleaning the chalkboards. Just the three of us working and chatting until that dire emotion began to evaporate. Thank you, Mr. Peterson.

The upper floors were for the upper-grade classrooms, and as you would ascend to the next level there came with that some pride and some arrogance as well. There was no excuse for a second-grade kid to ever be on the top floor, just wait your turn. The highest floor also had the best outside views and the air of maturity and of being so experienced and so accomplished was palpable up there in that rarified air. One year, someone figured out that our building had no means of escape from the top floor in case of a fire, so an ironworks fire escape was erected on the south side of the building adjacent to one of the classrooms, with a door constructed to lead out to that scaffold structure. Walking out onto that fire escape, suspended against the side of the building so high up, was not only thrilling but also took a little nerve and certainly something a first-grade kid couldn’t cope with. It was as close to an amusement park ride as I had gotten to thus far. They also fabricated a locked gate at the bottom entrance of the stairs so kids could not go up and down playing on the escape. But there were ways.

And fire drills were always entertaining. The lower-level grades got out first and would all gather around to watch the older kids descend from on high. Someday, that would be you. Fire drills were a common practice at school and getting several hundred school-aged kids quickly out the door was fascinating. There was so much attention paid to first forming the proper lines against the wall in our classroom, then waiting for permission from our teacher to start the orderly filing out of our room into the center area, then awaiting our turn to fall in lockstep to the line of kids from the class in front of you, and then out the door, that I’m quite certain if there was ever an actual fire, none of us would have ever made it out alive. And sadly our school was destroyed by a massive fire the year I got married and was never rebuilt. Today an apartment complex called Riverside Senior Housing covers the entire block and all traces of that marvelous school fortress and playground and those thousands of children’s voices have sadly disappeared. A precious city block once dedicated to the education of growing children now providing housing assistance to seniors in their sunset years. The cycle of life. At least they saved the name.

I remember us all being lined up one day at school to get the polio vaccine which was given to us in a pink sugar cube, which was certainly more pleasing than facing that horrifying needle. Poliomyelitis was a crippling viral disease that left many paralyzed, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt who guided this country through the titanic struggle of The Great Depression and World War II, all while confined to a wheelchair. Seeing young children at school and adults around town with leather and steel leg bracings was not common, but it was a part of our childhood landscape and for many years the summer plague would return and leave its mark on worried parents and a scared society until a vaccine was developed in 1955. The U.S. has been polio-free since 1979. President Roosevelt establish the March of Dimes foundation to help find a cure and to assist families suffering from the disease, an organization which is still in operation today focusing on healthy births, implemented his societal New Deal and defined American Liberalism. He passed away just three months into his fourth term and five months before the ending of World War II at the age of sixty-three, frail and exhausted, of a cerebral hemorrhage. And the aftermath of those two world wars left a much weakened world civilization and thus the consequences of soaring diseases. During our early wars from the American Revolution through World War I, diseases claimed more lives than did actual combat, with that trend finally being reversed during World War II, but it was still a significant factor and the societal sacrifices continued on for many years.

Measles was another general virus we grappled with, though not nearly as grave as polio and usually lasting only a few days with flu-like symptoms and the identifying reddish-dot rash all over your body. It was quite contagious and I’m not sure there was anyone in the neighborhood who did not take their turn with it, Can Rocky play? No, he has the measles, with a vaccine being developed when I was ten years old, and that vaccine was a shot, no sugar-cube-coating that one. We dealt with pertussis, diphtheria, and tetanus, Mom, I stepped on a rusty nail again, went right through my tennis shoe! You’re gunna need a tetanus shot, But I don’t want a shot! If you don’t you’re gunna get lockjaw, But I don’t want to have a locked jaw! which lead to the DTP vaccine, and rubella and mumps which lead to the combined MMR vaccine. Smallpox was also a routine but unique vaccine which left an identifying smallpox scar on your arm and that disease was declared eradicated in the U.S. in 1972. In many ways we were the incubation Petri dishes which led to many of our modern day childhood vaccines. We also grappled with the chickenpox and tuberculosis and influenza and streptococcus but which are all still around, so we won’t take credit for everything.

And as I am writing this the world has been seized by a worldwide pandemic of the Corona virus or COVID-19, forcing an unprecedented shutdown of economies and travel and schools around the globe. It is like nothing I have ever witnessed in my life. We are now in the sixth month of a surreal societal semi-lockdown with nearly a million deaths worldwide, but vaccines and therapeutics have already been developed and are being tested, which brings great hope of getting through this and back to some sense of normalcy. But it is beyond breathtaking to witness how a microscopic parasite can bring our world to a virtual standstill.

We also routinely held emergency disaster and preparedness drills. On those days each of us at school would be given a card attached to a ribbon to wear around our necks, describing our pretended injury, with bandages wrapped around our heads along with arms put into slings, and then we would be paraded outside into the yard and laid down in contorted positions as if something dreadful had just happened. Then the call was made and soon the fire engines and ambulances would arrive with sirens screaming and all kinds of commotion going on. The medical personnel would then scurry around inspecting each of us, reading our cards to determine who needed to be treated first. I actually got loaded into an ambulance one time, which was pretty cool. We didn’t actually go anywhere, but still. Afterwards, when it was all over, we would compare our assigned injury cards and boast of our acting skills and the Firemen would then gather us all together and talk to us about fire safety and first aid and then give each of us red plastic Fireman’s hats. It was utterly entertaining and got us out of our schoolwork for a good part of the day.

This was in the 50s and 60s and the Cold War with the Soviet Union was a hovering mood that was ever present in our lives and we also regularly held Civil Defense drills at school, intended to prepare us in case of an ICBM nuclear missile attack from Russia. While in the fourth grade, the world held its collective breath as President John Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev of Russia played out a high-stakes gamesmanship with nuclear missiles during the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis many believed was leading to a nuclear war. Both sides finally backed away from the precipice, made mutual concessions, and established the Moscow-Washington Direct Communications Link or hotline linking the Pentagon with the Kremlin. I had many, many moments as a child where I would look up into the skies, believing I was someday going to spot the vapor trails from an incoming missile barrage, watching it all end. And I was powerless to do anything about it.

Our school Civil Defense drills were preceded by a piercing, deafening alarm that would sound throughout the entire exercise and our instructed tactic was to then duck underneath our desks with arms and hands covering our heads. That was it. One day I figured out that probably would not have worked with a nuclear blast, with the thermal radiation vaporizing everything in sight coupled with the electromagnetic shockwave and residual radiation raining down on whatever was left. I then conversely concluded that our government officials purposefully and confidently determined that this course of action, of the earsplitting siren along with protecting our heads and the certain cover of our desks, would at best, make us feel empowered, and at worst, distract us, as our life ended.

Another preparation we practiced was to sound the alarm, fly open the school doors and then turn loose some four hundred grade-school kids to run home as quickly as we could and head down into the basements of our homes. We sometimes got sidetracked though, sauntering down the alleyway just gabbing for a while or just a quick stop at Sutton’s grocery store across the street from the school, but we eventually made it to our house. And it wasn’t total mayhem however, our moms knew it was coming and several Block Mothers were assigned to check on us throughout the drill and then tell us when it was safe to return to school, after we had lunch of course. If someone’s mom wasn’t home, which was rare, we were to head over to our Block Mother’s house. It was far and away the more enjoyable of the disaster drills we practiced.

Along with habitually searching the skies for missiles, I also spent a good deal of time gazing heavenward and believing I was going to one day catch sight of a UFO. This was a time when there was almost an hysteria about UFO’s, with sightings and pictures and news reports and TV shows about Unidentified Flying Objects permeating our lives. There were rampant rumors of captured aliens being held in secret at Homey Airport, better known as Area 51 along with numerous people around the country claiming they had been taken captive by aliens, then probed and examined and returned to earth. It was so recurrent and persistent I was certain that sooner or later, I was going to actually see one. It was simply a matter of time.

There were many occasions when we would spot something unusual in the sky, even a stray balloon got our full attention, and then that cold chill would momentarily run down your spine, for along with the shock of seeing something so strange, would also come the absolute altering of our beliefs and the realities of our place in the universe, along with the unthinkable ramifications that would bring with it. I hoped I would see one, and prayed it would never happen, all mingled in the same emotion. I think much of this frenzy was fostered from the limitations and technologies of our time, which made the heavens and the universe quite mysterious and unexplained. I was five years old when the United States launched its first space satellite into orbit, the Explorer 1 (six-feet-long and weighing thirty pounds), with the Soviet Union having launched the very first satellite, the Sputnik (twice the size of a basketball and the batteries lasted for three months) the year before. Since then some nine thousand have been sent into space, mapping the earth, providing communications and navigations, tracking weather, space telescopes, and for numerous military and commercial and scientific purposes, helping to unlock many of those mysteries.

As an eight-year-old boy I laid on my bed one afternoon listening to the live radio transmission of astronaut Scott Carpenter orbiting the earth in the Aurora 7 spacecraft, following this historic event on my green Mercury Capsule crystal radio I got for Christmas. That radio was the most incredible thing I had ever seen. It required no batteries, had a single wired earpiece and a wired clip you had to attach to something metal, and then simply turn the small knob on the top, rotating the internal crystal which would then pick up radio wave frequencies out of thin air. Unbelievable. Three months earlier John Glenn had become the first American to orbit the earth in Friendship 7, both of them members of the original Mercury Seven astronauts along with Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, Gordon Cooper, Wally Schirra, and Deke Slayton. Seven years later, Neil Armstrong, in the three-man craft of Apollo 11 along with Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin, landed and walked on the surface of the moon. I remember walking alone out into the street in front of our house just at dusk on that beautiful summer evening and looking up at the now emerging crescent moonrise and thinking to myself, There is a guy up there. It truly, truly astounded me. I was fifteen years old.

Just two years earlier the very first Apollo spacecraft, Apollo 1, catastrophically ignited during a launch rehearsal, taking the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. It was such a tragic loss but it also said a good deal about the resiliency and resolve of the Space Program and the earlier national challenge issued in the Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs delivered by then President John F. Kennedy to a Joint Session of Congress in 1961. As a nation, we were just emerging from decades of war and economic strife and were now in the midst of great international uncertainty and turmoil. In his message to the nation, he outlined the urgent need of standing for freedom throughout the world, of domestic economic progress, increased military defense, and space achievement, Which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth. Imploring its necessity and, Our eagerness to share its meaning, along with the impressive impact such exploration would have on all of mankind, one of his stated challenges was to accelerate the use of space satellites for weather predictions, world-wide communications, and to land a man on the moon and return him to earth safely, Before this decade is out.

The Apollo 11 spacecraft lifted off from earth on July 16, 1969 and spent three days traveling at times as fast as twenty-four thousand miles per hour to reach the moon, covering some two hundred and fifty thousand miles, then landing on the moon about four miles off their target in the Sea of Tranquility which forced Armstrong to take manual control of the lunar module Eagle to set it down on a smooth surface, and then with his declaration, The Eagle has landed, with all of it being televised, which was extraordinary. Upon setting foot on the moon’s surface he states his celebrated, That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Among his first descriptions glancing around the landscape now in front of him was, It has a stark beauty all its own. It’s like much of the high desert of the United States. Spending about two and a half hours out on the surface of the moon along with Buzz Aldrin, then lifting off again to re-dock with the Columbia command module and its pilot Michael Collins and then returning safely back to earth to complete this improbable journey, and just five months before the end of the decade. Many leaders are purely political, a few are visionaries.

And the vestiges of World War II, beginning just twenty-one years after World War I, The war to end all wars, had ended with The Great Depression sandwiched in between them, were still fresh and palpable everywhere, with that war itself ending only eight years before my birth. It was an horrific hostility in which more than sixty million people lost their lives, many of them violently, accounting for nearly three percent of the entire living human race. In the span of just thirty-one years, nearly eighty million human beings perished in those two World Wars. My father served in the Navy during World War II, assigned to the USS Pelias, and most of the men that surrounded me in my youth served in some capacity in the military. My Uncle Harold, my father’s little brother, was captured in battle and spent several months as a prison of war. I heard those stories, saw the photographs and felt the rawness of this terrible conflict ever present in these incredible men, and army helmets and ammunition boxes and bayonets and rifles and canteens and uniforms and army jackets were a common sight in my youth, not only in my own home, but also in the homes of most of my friends.

Then there was the Berlin Wall, this mammoth, barbaric barricade encasing half of the city of Berlin, Germany, part of the spoils of war and the dividing of territories between the United States, France, Britain, and Russia, separating East and West Berlin. Constructed quickly in 1961, some sixteen years after the War’s end to stem the tide of people fleeing East Germany, the Wall became the physical symbol of the Cold War of political and economic tensions between former allies along with the notional barrier or Iron Curtain of intentional isolationism by the Soviet Union and its satellite nations in the Eastern Bloc of Europe. I was eight years old. And the escape attempts and the atrocities and the angst of that Wall were an accepted awareness throughout my youth. It was a frequent and disconcerting segment of the news, along with the numerous books and movies and demonstrations protesting its very existence. The Wall was halfway around the world, and yet it was very much a part of our life.

In June of 1963, just five months before his assassination, President John Kennedy gave his famous, Ich bin ein Berliner, speech, in concert with the growing world political and social pressures for Russia and East Germany to demolish the Wall, culminating with President Ronald Reagan’s speech in 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate in Germany imploring, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! Then two years later, after twenty-eight years of struggle and protest, the Wall abruptly and miraculously came down. I was thirty-six years old. And sitting in the curio in our home today is a small piece of that Berlin Wall, given to me by my sister Sharon who recovered it on her visit to one of her sons serving at an American military base in Germany. A Touchstone from events that touched every element of my youth, a conflict my father served in and he now has great-grandchildren serving in the necessary aftermath of that dreadful World War.

Even at a time that seemed to be limitless in its possibilities to a child, there was on overarching air of bleakness and anxiety of what may lie ahead throughout my youth. The wars had altered the entire world and bent its innocence and its politics and its references into a raw and uncertain state. Quasi-mandatory reading later in junior high school was George Orwell’s 1984 which was written in 1949, just after World War II had ended, and was a possibly prophetic glimpse of a technology-driven, centralized government future which was used to control information and thought and freedoms and privacy, played out through the fictional lives of Winston and Julia. Influenced greatly by the dreadfulness of those wars, this book, along with Orwell’s other prolific novel Animal Farm, was an undertaking in part to forewarn us of the eventual cost of trying to create Utopia or perfect societies and that governmental control, loss of personal freedoms, and eventually tyranny were so often the end result. It alarmed me reading it as a young boy, casting a doubtful and despairing possibility on life ahead.

But I lived to find out that 1984 was not all that much different than 1967, other than a little more peaceful. And profoundly interesting that with all of Orwell’s foreboding of the technologies used by Big Brother to control our lives, that it was in 1984 that the Apple Macintosh, the first widespread mass-marketed personal computer was introduced, certainly bringing with it some genuine concerns about intrusions into our lives, but also heralding in an unprecedented era of knowledge and tools and access and expansion of information along with even greater capacities to actually guard against secretive erosions of societal and individual freedoms. The human spirit is the most prevailing influence and energy and safeguard throughout the history of mankind, and probably always will be. I have witnessed all my life the stark and still perplexing reality that there is good, astonishing good, and there is also evil, horrific and incomprehensible evil within the human race, which has fostered and fashioned my mounting belief, and hope, that good will always prevail, simply because it incredibly resilient and virtually impossible to subdue.

Nearly every week our teachers would hand out the latest installment of My Weekly Reader which was in essence a grade-school level newspaper, published and distributed nationwide and which kept us up-to-date with current events and fun games and interesting articles by different authors. My Weekly Reader gave rise to my interest in reading when I was young, along with my venture into stamp and coin collecting. Along with the Reader we were also given order forms where we could purchase books and bags of stamps and coin-collecting booklets among other things. And when those boxes arrived at the school and our teacher would begin handing out our orders, now that was a magical day. We also had Pen Pals from other grade schools around the country that we would write to and receive letters from, which was always interesting and enjoyable when those letters would arrive. I was in the fifth grade when we first began using zip codes on addresses in this country, and a postage stamp was four cents.

I became an avid reader in grade school beginning with the Raggedy Ann and Andy and Dick and Jane series, and then onto the Nancy Drew mysteries The Secret of the Old Clock and The Hidden Staircase among others, along with The Hardy Boys, Joe and Frank, in The Tower Treasure and The House on the Cliff which were all fascinating and fun to read. I loved reading the novel Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls, which is one of my favorite books, but the more intriguing and even astonishing connection to this book for me is the personal story of Wilson Rawls. He grew up in Oklahoma during the Great Depression and always dreamed of being a writer and wrote many novels and hundreds of short stories, but he kept them rolled up and stored away, believing no one would be interested in them or, Would waste time printing junk like that, he later recounted to a reporter. And just before his marriage he gathered the manuscripts all together and burned them, not wanting his new bride to think of him as a failure.

But his desire and dream to write would not leave him alone and confessing his secret deed to his wife Sophie, and because of her encouragement and even insistence, he quit his job and rewrote this novel again in three weeks. I had it memorized, he later said. And the most captivating and even incredible aspect of all of this, at least to me, is that at this time in his life, while he is re-writing this beloved novel under its original name of The Secret of the Red Fern, he and his wife are actually living right in our town, less than two miles from our neighborhood. And through the persistent efforts of Sophie, the story was published in The Saturday Evening Post under the title Hounds of Youth, and then printed in book form by Doubleday in 1961, the year I entered the third grade. After its publication he loved to speak at schools and civic functions around the area, he even held a book signing at my father’s real estate business partner’s bookstore downtown called Pioneer Bookstore. And although I have no recollection of it, it is possible and even probable that I may have encountered or met him in my youth. The couple eventually moved to Wisconsin, they had no children of their own and he passed away from cancer at the age of seventy-one. Where the Red Fern Grows has sold more than seven million copies and is still required reading in many schools. Today a beautiful bronze sculpture of Billy Colman and his two Redbone Coonhounds Old Dan and Little Ann stands outside the public library in our hometown, just eleven blocks from my childhood home where I first read it.

Then I became even more captivated and devoted in reading the true life stories of Glenn Cunningham, Joseph Merrick, Helen Keller, Anne Frank, Winston Churchill, and Harry Houdini, and then my interest in the genre of writing began to evolve entirely once I began reading the entire eight book sequence of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series. These are her own stories narrated by herself of her life in Missouri, her birthplace, then onto the Kansas plains and then to Wisconsin, beginning with her first book Little House in the Big Woods and ending with These Happy Golden Years. The spirit and style of her writing just captivated me, for she was a natural wordsmith at finding the miraculous in the mundane. That was her gift. Simple, sincere, straight truth I found is what speaks to me. It was unadorned and unpretentious writing about life and two of my favorite quotes from her