Shortly after I was born my mother took me back to St. Joseph. We lived there until the summer after I had finished kindergarten. While living in St. Joseph I got the chance to take my first airplane flight. It was 1949 and my father decided that we were going to move to Seattle Washington. In route to Seattle we stopped in Los Angeles to visit my mother's half-brother Mickey. We stayed with Mickey for a short time and during this time my father got a job as a night-watchman. My folks decided to stay in Los Angeles and so they bought a house in South Central Los Angeles (now known as Watts).

During the time my father was a night-watchman he acquired a German Shepherd dog named Duffy that also helped guard the place where my father worked. Before I could enter the 1st grade in LA my folks sold the house and we, including Duffy, continued our trip to Seattle.

We stopped for a night's rest at a motel in Sunnyvale CA, about 400 miles North of LA and 60 miles South of San Francisco. After we had gotten settled-down for the night, to our surprise, there was a family staying at the motel that we knew from St. Joseph. Since we knew someone there in Sunnyvale my folks decided to stay there for a while. My father got a job with the Sunnyvale Police Department and my mother went to work for Westinghouse.

Once my folks started working we rented a house on Murphy Street, the main street in town. Our house was right next to a mortuary and I struck-up a friendship with the son of the owner of the mortuary. We were living there when we got our first television. This came about because my friend and I would sit outside an electronics store that played a tv in the display window each evening. My father didn't think that his son should have to do that so he bought us a brand new Westinghouse 12" black & white tv. I also got my first bicycle while we lived there.

Since both my mother and father were working and making good money my folks decided to buy a new track home on Lori Street for the huge price of $9,000! Shortly after moving to Lori Street my father went to work for the State of California. He drove a state car and had an office in San Francisco. His job was to inspect dry-cleaners to make sure they complied with the requirements of their state license. His area of responsibility was from San Francisco north to the California/Oregon state line. Each summer I would go with my dad as he checked on the dry-cleaners that were in the Redwoods area of Northern California. This was like a 'mini-vacation' for me! We lived on Lori Street until 1957 when my father decided that he wanted to get out of the 'rat-race.'

After looking-over a catalog that he had received from United Farms, and taking a trip back to Northwest Arkansas to view a 289 acre farm up in the Ozarks (Madison County), he bought the farm for $4,000. When we moved to the farm we used an old Dodge ton-and-half truck and our 1952 Hudson Hornet fully packed and pulling a home-made trailer that my dad and I had built. The drive took 9 days! Our truck was so heavy that it couldn't pull the hills except in duel-low gear. In fact, the truck was so slow going up hills that once or twice I got out and ran along beside the truck to check the tires! We also had lots of blow-outs on the truck along the way.

When we got to Huntsville Arkansas we found out that the truck was too heavy to pull the dirt-road hills to get to our farm so we located a family by the name of Bean, who lived near our farm, to help us take some loads from the Dodge truck to our farm using their Chev pick-up truck. It took about three pick-up loads to get the Dodge truck unloaded enough so it could get to our farm.

When my mother first seen the farm she cried! The place was ran-over with weeds and didn't have electricity or running water. Although we were only a mile and a half from the electricity it might as well been a million miles! We had a well for water that was 180 feet deep. It was my job to pull the water for the house, 4 buckets/day, 3 buckets/day for the animals, which consisted of one horse, one cow, plenty of chickens and one sow, and water we needed for bathing. When we took a bath it was in tub that we would put in the kitchen on the floor.

At first for heating we just used the wood-burning cook-stove. Later on we installed an oil burning heater in the living room with a drum outside to hold the oil. For storing food we bought a propane refrigerator. My mother cooked on the cook-stove at first, which I would have to cut-down trees and split the logs into the size that would fit into the stove. Later on my dad and I installed a propane burning stove. We even used oil lamps for lighting. Talk about roughing it!

When we first got our sow we kept her in a pen across the dirt road that ran through our property and I would go over there to feed her each day. At first I would just lean over the fence and drop the slop into her trough. As she ate I would lean over the fence and scratch her back. This was because I was afraid of her since I had heard stories about how mean a hog could be. After about a week I got brave enough to walk into the pen with her when I fed her and she didn't give me a second thought. All she was interested in was the slop I was bringing her. A little while later we let her out of the pen and brought her across the road to where our house was. Our sow was so much a pet by then that she would lay on our back porch against the screen-door so that we would have to make her get up whenever we wanted to use the door!

As it turned-out, our farm was right on the dividing line between two school districts. Huntsville, the county seat, was the biggest school of the two but they wouldn't send a school bus out to our farm. Hindsville said that they would send the bus out to pick me up so my folks enrolled me there. The first day the school bus came out to our farm the driver knocked-over our fence trying to turn the bus around. I swear that the driver was drinking from the way he acted. The other kids on the bus talked so slow, in the Southern manner, that it drove me crazy listening to them. They also smoked on the bus and chewed tobacco! I sure wasn't used to that!

The Hindsville school was very small and, since I was from California, the kids treated me as if I was from Mars! After three days of this treatment I asked to see the principal to tell him that I wanted to have a transfer to the Huntsville school district. Once I explained what I wanted the principal pointed to a paddle hanging on the wall and told me if I ever bothered him again he would use it on me! Needless to say, that was my last day at that school!

To catch the school bus to Huntsville I had to walk about 2 miles to our neighbor�s farm. He would drive his daughter and I to where the school bus would pick us up. After about a month of this my dad bought an old Jeep and I would drive over to the neighbor�s farm and pick-up his daughter and we would drive to the bus stop where I'd leave the Jeep until the bus brought us back that afternoon. On days that it would snow the bus wouldn't be able to make it and that meant that I wouldn't have to go to school. Boy, did I pray for snow!