What I want to do in the following is to put on paper some of the things I remember about my youth. I'm sure most people won't be interested in what I'm writing but I want to write this because after my father and mother died I realized I didn't know very much about my parents and what they were like when they were young. Now that they are gone, I have no way to find out. I'm writing this so my children will not have the same problem .

Remember, these are my memories and If someone reads this and remembers things a little differently, well, like I said, these are My Memories.

I do not claim to be a writer and if bad grammar and bad spelling bothers you, please don't read any further.

I was born in Moline Ks. Oct. 15 1942 to Delmer Palmer and Wanda (Vada) Dean Boone. I was born in a house(gone today) one block north of the "swinging bridge". I was delivered by a midwife, Elizabeth Boone, which was my mother�s brother�s wife. My given name is "Merle", my nickname is "Mickey" How someone got Mickey out of Merle I don't know! I was named after my Uncle Merle Palmer. A year after I was born Uncle Merle and Aunt Betty had a son and they named him Merle. That meant that we had three Merle Palmer's in a little town of 350 people.

I was the third son, my nearest brother(Ronnie)was four years older. My sister was two years younger. My oldest brother is Jerry and my sister is Janet.

I suppose that by today's standards, our family in my early youth would be considered poor. Dad worked in the Oil fields as a Driller. For the most part we were probably no different than most all other families of that time and that area. Most of my linked memories begin about the time we moved to Peru Ks. where I attended grade school and high school. Peru is(was) a small town in S.E. Ks. of about 350 people. In 1950, highway 166 ran through the town splitting the town half. From the east, the highway came into town just south of the school building, made a wide curve around to the west side of the school, then to the north about the space of four blocks, then up a small hill and then another three blocks before it made a sharp left turn. At this point Peru's main street began. It ended one block later. The highway went west down a small hill and out of town. On the north side of main street were two Grocery stores and Ma Smiths Cafe. The Grocery stores were on the north side, one on each corner. My Great-Uncle Paul Palmer owned the store on the west end of the block and Roy Geaseman owned the other one. Underneath Geasemans Grocery store in a basement was the Peru pool hall with its own entrance on the east side down a long stair way. At one time or another I worked in both grocery stores as stock clerk and delivery boy. On the southeast corner where the highway turned west on main street was the Peru State Bank where I had my first bank account and secured my first loan for a 1955 ford. The town post office was just east of the bank on a gravel road, my mother worked in the post office for several years.

We livid in southeast Peru just south of highway 166. Between our house and the highway was a strip of land that was railroad right of way. Train tracks had once laid there but had long since disappeared. The land still belonged to the railroad and nothing was allowed to be built on the railroad land for about a block wide all the way through town. The area was over grown with trees, brush, six foot high Johnson grass and "pig weed". It made a perfect place for kids to build tree houses, forts and anything our imagination would let us build. From the age of about eight, the children of the town of Peru had the run of the entire town. The whole town seemed like our big back yard, we could go out and play in it any time we wanted to. In those days, child molesting and other problems so prevalent today were not heard of and our parents didn't think anything of letting us roam anywhere we wanted to go which also included the surrounding hills. On the south edge of Peru was the tallest hill in the area. (For the life of me I can not remember what we called this hill so I'll call it "big hill".) from the top "big hill" you could see forever, at least that's what it looked like from the eyes of a eight year old. Just south of "big hill" was "The Dalton cave". The local folk lore had it that the Dalton gang stayed in the cave the night before their infamies raid on Coffeyville Ks. Just east of the cave was Devils Den, it was a very high cliff with a small cave about half way up the cliff. East of town was Saddle Rock. Saddle Rock was a rock that jutted out from a cliff. We could crawl out on it and set in it like saddle and have a perfect view of the big city of Peru. North of town was the Middle Caney river where the swimming hole was. The boys in the town spent many summers days skinny dipping in that river. The water in the river was so muddy that after swimming in it we all needed to go home and take a bath. Most all the kids in Peru had the complete run of this entire area. It's always been hard for me to understand how we kept from getting killed or seriously hurt from falling off a cliff, drowning, or being bitten by a rattle snake or copperhead.

The west side of town was bordered by the "the Red Ribbon road". It was called the Red Ribbon because the road was cut through red sand. Along the north side of the road was a row of hedge trees which have a red tint. The trees were planted during the thirties for a wind break. From the view of big hill the road looked like a long red ribbon.

From about age eight to twelve, one of our favorite past times during the summer was to have a "war". The "war" pitted the kids from north Peru against the kids from south Peru. It was not because we disliked each other, it was just something we liked to do. We spent weeks preparing for the war. We made bows from tree branches and arrows from pig weeds. I don't know the right name for whatever pig weed really is but it is a plant that grows in a single straight stock. If you cut the little ones and remove the leaves and let them dry they became very ridged and they made perfect arrows for our home made bows. Pig weed could also grow six feet tall, these made perfect spears. We also made swords, shield, catapults and many other weapons. On the appointed day I would hook my red wagon to my bicycle and load it down with ammunition. I would put my body through my bow, my arrows in my quiver, my sword in my belt and head for the battle field. We would meet for battle at our favorite spot which was on the rail road land at a place where there had once been a trestle over a creek. It was two high mounds separated by a trench. For hours our missals would hurl back and forth, arrows, spears, mud balls from our catapults and even marbles from our beanie flippers. How we kept from getting seriously hurt I will never understand.

During the hot summer nights we played games (we had no TV). Most popular was a game called flag. Each side had a flag and a jail. Each flag was hung on a post or tree or something located at the site of the teems jail. Each side would try to capture the other teams flag. If you got touched by a member of the other teem they put in their jail. The only way to get out of jail was to be touched by a member of your own team. To win the game, a teem member had to capture the other teems flag and carry it back to their own jail. We also played kick the can, tag, and other games. We had the run of the town even at night.

Today, people enjoy the game of paint ball. For some reason people like to experience the thrill of being able to point a weapon at someone, pull the trigger, hit a human target and come away with the satisfaction they were able to out wit the other person and maybe even bring a little pain to the adversary in the process, while not doing any real damage. As a young child we had a similar game, although not nearly as sophisticated. We had hand made rubber guns. We would saw from wood and fabricate a gun that was shaped to look like a pistol or a rifle. The projectiles we used were made from the rubber of a tire enter tube. In those days all tires had enter tubes, there was no such thing as a tubeless tire. When a tire had a blow out it usually made the tube useless and we always had an amble supply of rubber for our guns from one of the local filling stations. The trigger mechanism was a clothes pin used by our mothers to hang out washed clothes on a clothes line. We would use scissors to cut strips of rubber. How long and how wide the strips were depended on the length of the barrel of the weapon that it was going to be used with. If the strips of rubber were to narrow, they would break. If the strips were to wide or to long they wouldn't go far enough. The rubber strips had to be the right length to fit each individual weapon. Trial and error usually solved these problems. The rubber projectiles were folded in half and a knot tied at the open end of the bands leaving two tails extended from the knot about two inches long. The closed end of the band was looped over the end of the barrel and the end with the two tails were stretched back to the clamping end of the clothes pin. The clothes pin was attached to the wooden frame using the same type of rubber we used for the projectiles. We would wrap one rubber band around the wooden handle of the gun and through the mouth of the clothes pin, then put one around the trigger end. We would then wrap a length of rubber over the top of the clamping end of the clothes pin because the spring of the clothes pin by itself was not sufficient enough to hold the stretched rubber band. Once the rubber projectile was stretched and secured by the clothes pin it was ready to fire and all we had to do was to compress the other end of the clothes pin. The velocity of the rubber projectile was enough to give the sound of a satisfying ouch coming from your opponent given they were close enough. This kind of activity would keep us busy for days. When we tired of this game we would move on to something else. Our games always involved something we ourselves had made or invented. We very seldom had toys that were bought from a store with the exception of a bicycle and a BB gun.

Most every family has a family pet. My family had a collie named Laddy. It's the only family pet I remember and it's the only pet that any of my brothers or sister ever talk about when were talking about old times. What we all remember is that Laddy was extremely protective of my sister Janet and I when we were small. My brothers can recall numerous occasions when laddy intervened on our behalf to keep us out of harms way. One of the things I remember was when a large truck was coming down one of Peru's seldom used gravel roads, Laddy got between Janet and the road and guided her into the ditch before the truck got to us. Laddy got old and hard of hearing with bad eye sight and he was struck by a car on highway 166 just north of our house. Laddy was still alive when I found him and Janet and I used a board as a stretcher and carried him home and put him in the unused "chicken house" which was outback of our house. That evening dad took his 12 gage shot gun and put Laddy out of his misery. That�s the only time I can remember dad with tears in his eyes except when mom died in 1975.

I remember the Fourth of July as always being celebrated in big fashion with picnics, trips to relatives and fire works. On one particular fourth, my Uncle Merle and Aunt Betty mail ordered a huge amount of fire works, more than most of us had ever seen in one place. Our families got together that fourth of July evening to shoot fireworks. Our family only had a few so we shot ours first. While we were shooting ours, one of our roman candles flared off into Uncle Merle's and Aunt Betty�s box of fire works and set it afire. All of a sudden nighttime was turned into daylight. Roman candles, fire crackers, snow cones, spinners, cherry bombs were all going off at once. Children went running and screaming, men headed for the hoses, and the woman ran to get water pales. For awhile we had some real concern that it might catch the wood shingles on our roof on fire. It did catch the dry Johnson grass in the field just north of the house on fire. Soon all the neighbors arrived with wet gunny sacks and water pales, and in about two hours the fire was brought under control. That was the best 4th of July we ever had.

My mother�s side of the family got together two or three times a year, usually on one of the summer holidays. We had lots of cousins and lots of fun. We had family picnics at Howard Ks. where my Grandpa Boone lived. He taught all the grandkids to play poker. My cousin Buddy and I were great pals and stayed at each others house a week or two during the summer or at our Aunt Ethel and Uncle Frances house in Moline. There wasn�t much to do in a small town like Moline but they had a movie theater and I remember Buddy and I seeing "Seven Brides For Seven Brothers" eight times. Since high school I have seen Buddy only once.

A lot of my cousins on my fathers side lived around Peru. My Cousin Tony and I were great friends and grew up together on a daily basis and played football and basketball together in school. Since high school we hardly ever see each other.

Our house in Peru was a white frame house set on about 1/2 acre of ground. The house sat on the west side of a north bound dead end drive. The front of the house faced east and the kitchen door was about the middle of the house and faced south toward Big Hill. Just outside the kitchen door, a side walk angled west to a white building we called the smoke house. Another sidewalk went east to the front of the house and then north, past the front porch to the front step and then east the parking area. Just south of the smoke house was a large area about 50' by 100' were dad had our garden. After I began 4H the garden became my responsibility because that was my project for 4H. To the east of the garden dad built a basketball court. Running north and south it was about 50' long and 30' wide with a goal at each end. Dad hauled chat in for the floor. After the grass grew through the chat the area made a good Croaky court. Between the house and the basketball court was a very large Pear tree which produced the largest and sweetest pears I have ever eaten. The pear tree is where mom got most of the switches she used on us to keep us under control. If the switch didn't work, we got it from dad�s belt when he got home.

One thanksgiving day some of my cousins and I were climbing in a elm tree behind my granddads filling station in Peru. Tony my cousin was farther up in the tree than I was and he wanted to come down. I couldn't move because their was someone below me. while he was trying to get to another limb to get around me he fell and broke his leg when he landed on a tree root. I still have the picture of him falling, etched in my memory.

One day Mom was home by herself and she saw a large five foot long snake slithering by the kitchen door. She went to the smoke house and got a hoe and commenced an hour long battle with the snake before finally killing it. Asked later why she had fought so long and hard to kill a harmless king snake she said she thought it was a rattle snake and was afraid it might hurt the kids when they came home.

When we first moved to the house in Peru we didn't an inside bathroom. We used the out house out back by the old red barn. It didn't take long before dad built a bathroom in a pantry just off the kitchen. At first the house had 4 rooms and a kitchen. Later dad built a bed room for Janet. All three of us boys slept in the west bedroom. The house was heated only by two space heaters, one in the dining room and one in the living room (the stoves were only four foot apart). In the winter our bedroom was ice cold, we put our pillows on top of the tall porcelain covered heating stove in the dining room to get them warm before we jumped in bed. In the summer the rooms were so hot we sprinkled the bed with mom�s clothes sprinkler to cool off the bed before we got in.

In the living room we had an old console radio and record player(We got our first TV when I was about 14). It was rather bulky and about three foot high. I can remember Dad laying on the floor in the dark with his head against the radio listening to Harry Carry and the St. Luis Cardinals.("This is St. Luis Cardinals baseball with Harry Carry and my side kick Gabby Street, brought to you by Greasy Dick beer(no kidding), Just set back, relax and grab a greasy".) That must have been about 1954. Harry Carry died about two weeks ago. On that same radio we also listened to pre television radio shows like Inter Sanctum, Fibber Magee and Molly, The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid and many others. The radio provided the sound; we provided the pictures with our imagination. When I was a young teenager we teenagers took turns hosting dances at each others homes. That record player provide the music with 45 and 78 disks. At Christmas time the combination record player and radio was also used to play Christmas music. I can still hear Gene Autry singing Rudolf The Red Nosed Rain Deer and Bing Crosby�s White Christmas on those 78 disks we had. Speaking of Christmas, from the time I Was about 12 years old I was the one who procured the tree. I would walk up big hill with an ax or saw, cut down a cedar tree and drag it all the way home. It usually took me about four hrs.

One summer dad built Janet and I a cement swimming pool. He dug a hole 4' by 8' and about two foot deep and poured cement in it. We thought it was great because we were the only kids in town to have our own pool. The only thing wrong was that it was built on level ground and it had no drain. We filled it with a water hose. After swimming it for a while and getting our feet muddy, the water became really muddy and we had to empty it with a bucket.

I started the first grade in Peru, and all I remember about it is that the name of my teacher was Mrs. Alford. By the second grade the family had moved to Dexter Ks. At Dexter my two brothers and I were playing football and Jerry accidentally stepped on my leg and broke it. I missed so much school that the teacher recommended I take the second grade over again. We moved back to Peru and I started the 2ed grade at Peru. My third grade teacher was Mrs. McElroy. I had two girl friends during grade school, Marilyn Anderson and Jo Ann Sleeth. Judy and I saw both of them this past summer. We hadn't seen Either one of them in thirty yr.'s.

The school building in Peru was unique. In one way it was the classic red brick school building, but in other ways it was quite different. It sat, facing west by it's self in the middle of a raised 15 acre tract. From a distance it looked tall and majestic. I have always been very glad to have been raised in Peru and to have gone to the Peru school. In a small town and a small school I think that kids are automatically sheltered from a lot of negative out side influences. Now Peru school it's self was not known for its academia because their were those who transferred to other schools for a chance at a better college opportunity. As for myself all I really wanted was to play sports. In a small school almost anyone who wants to play sports gets to play. The sport I played best was basketball; the sport I liked to play the best was football. In the Eighth grade we had organized basketball competition with other schools. When I entered high school as a freshman I became a starter on the high school "A" team. You have to remember that it was a very small school and most of the time if you had a heart beat you got to play. I averaged between 20 and 30 points a game and In my senior year my coach arranged a scholarship for me to play basketball at Independence Jr. collage. My cousin Tony was pretty good, and between him and me in our last two years of high school we usually scored the majority of the points. My problem was that I was to small- 5'8" 130lbs., Tony he was even smaller. Both our names are Merle Palmer and when the paper wrote about our games they called us the Palmer Duo.

. As a freshman I played defense on a standard 11 man football team. We probably only had 18 people on the whole squad. we played teams like Sedan, Caney, Cedar vale and Chetopa. In my sophomore year we changed leagues and started playing 6 and 8 man football because we just didn't have enough boys to play 11 man football. When your young it doesn't matter if your a � B" school or " 5 A" school, the level of competition just doesn't matter. All that mattered to me was that I got to play. At a bigger school I would have never been able to play high school football because of my size, but at Peru I was one of the better players. I played end and wide out and sometimes halfback and I have made a few touchdowns. We had a halfback (Curtice Riley) 6'1"-180 Lbs. He was really fast. Tony, my cousin was the Quarterback with a really good passing arm. In my junior year we went undefeated with the winning margin never under 20 points. We averaged 47 points per game, mainly do to Curtice and Tony.

I also played baseball in school. I was a left-handed pitcher. My high school coach actually told me I ought to think about trying out for the pro's. During the summer between my Jr. and Sr. year I pitched for the Caney American Legion until I hurt my arm. I hurt my arm because I wouldn't practice enough to keep my arm in good shape. After that I didn't do very well.

About the age of 14 a lot of the boys in Peru began working for the farmers hauling Hay. After I first turned 14 I worked for Roy Geaseman in his grocery store. The next summer I started hauling hay. The farmers paid us six dollars a day to work from 8 in the morning until sundown. If we worked from noon until sundown, we got 3 dollars. Six dollars a day was not very much even then, and in our senior year, all of the boys went on strike for 1$ hour. The farmers didn't have a choice. We got the raise. Hauling hay is hot and hard dirty work. The Kansas summers are between 95 and 105 deg. When you�re in a hay field without a breeze it seems hotter than that. The way we hauled hay was; two boys walked beside a flat bed truck with the bed of the truck about chest high, two more boys were on the truck stacking the hey. You had to grab a bail(about 40 Lb's.) with your "Hay hook", bring one end up to your hip, grab the other end with the hook and leverage it onto the truck. In the summer between my freshman and sophomore yr.'s, a farmer, (Hank Carter) asked me to drive a tractor and plow for him. The problem was I didn't know how to drive a tractor, or plow. "No problem", he said, "I'll teach you". We got on the tractor and went from one end of the field to the other and then he got off and left. I made two more passes around the field and got to close to a fence and ran a fence post through a 100$ tire. He fired me and I went home. Two days later he came back and asked me if I wanted to give it another try. I worked for him and his brother for two more summers. Plowing is a hot, dirty and boring job. Most of the time I sat out in the open on top of the tractor with only a straw hat to give me shade. About half way through the summer before my Sr. year, I was tired of plowing so I went back to Hauling Hay. When we worked for the farmers we did other things, we hauled grain to market, fed cattle and one time I helped castrate 120 pigs. During the non summer months I worked every Saturday for Hopi Hopkins. Hopi had a egg and chicken delivery route that on Sat. went from Independence to Cedar vale Ks. He picked me up in Peru about 10 am. We went to Sedan and Cedar vale stopping at stores and then back to Peru by 8 PM., for this I got five dollars.

Stealing watermelon is not steeling, at least that was what most of the kids thought when I was a teenager. Steeling watermelon was a tradition, and we were obligated as Kansas teenagers to keep that tradition alive. This is the way we pulled it off. About 11 or 12 at night we would drive slowly past our victim�s field, and then another quarter of a mile to be safe. Sneaking back to the field keeping low in ditches to make sure we weren't observed by the farmer, we climbed through the barbed wire fence and into the field thumping each watermelon for ripeness and checking for size. One time, just at the time we found the right melon, a dog started to bark in the farmers yard. We grabbed the melon and started running as fast as we could, hoping we wouldn't hear the sound of a shotgun. We threw the melon in the back seat, spun out in hale of dust and gravel, found a good place to eat the melon and talked and laughed about how daring we had been. Now that's entertainment. Of course if I ever caught my kids doing something like that, there would have been hell to pay.

Nights in Peru for a teenager were pretty boring (that's always a complaint of every teenager no matter where they live). Halloween nights were not boring. We had a variety of things to entertain us. One of which was pushing over all the out houses(out door toilets) in town or better yet, moving them about two feet back so the user would disappear from sight just as he was getting ready to open the door. Another prank we liked to pull was to take string and stretch it across the highway about eyeball high. At night when a cars lights hit string it looks like a big rope. You could always hear the screeching of tires on Halloween night and everyone in town new what it was. Another thing we liked to do was lay a old tire wrapped partly in brown paper wrapping.( that's the way NEW tires were wrapped in those days)We would then tie a long rope to it and hide. Someone driving by would think a new tire had fallen off a truck. You would be surprised how many people would actually stop to pick it up. When they bent down to grab the tire we would yank on the rope scaring the daylights out of them.

One Halloween my cousin Tony and I bought some rope and hauled the city park benches up to the top of the bank roof. The bank was a two story red brick building with a flat roof and a two foot high ledge all the way around the outer edge of the roof. We put the benches on the ledge and they looked from the ground as if they would fall off any minute. The benches couldn�t fall because we had secured them with rope. The local Marshall climbed on top of the bank roof and moved the benches back off the ledge. The Marshall told me he had seen me buy the rope and he knew I was the culprit. He told me I had better get up there and get those benches off that bank roof. One night Tony and I removed them and hid them behind the jail. The Marshall didn't know the benches were down for another month.

One of my pastimes when I was bored was to walk the mile to "Town" and get a Pepsi from Ma Smiths Cafe, then go to my Uncle Puds store and sit on a stool and read magazines from the stores magazine rack. Uncle Pud (Paul Palmer)would always ask me if I was going to pay for the magazine and I always said I would but I never did.

One day while I was sitting on that stool reading,(late summer of 58) Donna(not her real name)came in to the store with another girl. Donna introduced me to a very pretty and petite little girl, her name was Judy Littlepage. She had her hair pulled straight back, not in a bun but in a swirl with a comb (French role). She was wearing red short shorts with a white blouse and ear rings through her pierced ears. She was very sober and when they walked away I watched her and thought "very nice". After they went down an isle to the back of the store I got up and went down another isle so I could get another look at her. After they left the store I thought, she was with Donna, and Donna's reputation is kind of bad and I'm not sure I ought to run around with girls like that, so I sighed and thought, to bad(I was 15). A couple of days later my cousin Margaret asked me if I had met the new girl in town. I said yes but she was with Donna. Margaret immediately said, "yes but she's not like that, she's really a nice girl�. she just moved in next door to Donna and Donna was just showing her around town". I instantly renewed my interest. Margaret and I arranged to have Judy at Margaret's house on a day when I just "happened" to drop by. I asked Judy to go with me to the upcoming county fair. She said she would. Now earlier that summer I had met a girl at 4H camp from Cedar vale Ks., I also had asked her to meet me at the fair for a date that same night. Her name was Charlin. Charlin livid in Cedar vale and Judy livid in Peru. Because my daddy always told me that a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, I decided to go with Judy. Judy being really pretty also had a lot to do with it. I was only 15 and didn't have a driver�s licensee or a car, so I arranged for us to double date with Robert Rathburn and his date. Robert had a 1950 Studebaker. We did go to the fair and Judy told me that I introduced her to Charlin which I don't remember at all. I do remember that when we got back to Judy's house I walked her to the door and went back to the car, turned and waved to Judy who was still standing on the porch and said "goodnight Charlin".

Evidently my foot in the mouth didn't cause a problem (although she's never let me forget it) because Judy and I began spending time with each other. Her mother had let her go on that first date at age 15 only because it was a double date and her father was still in the Army. When her dad was discharged and came to Peru he wouldn't let her date at all until she was 16. I turned 16 that Oct. but I didn't have a car and Judy couldn't date anyway. We could see each other at school, school functions and ball games. Judy became a cheerleader that year and after school and after the ball games at Peru I would walk her home. We would always stop at "the filling station" and get Pepsi's and BBQ Potato chips. The Pepsi at my grandfathers filling station was special because the temperature of the cooler was kept at a temperature that when you first opened the bottle, ice formed about one inch thick at the top of the bottle. Years later when I got out of the service and we came back to the area, one of the first things we did was to stop at that filling station and get a iced Pepsi. Judy turned 16 in March of 59 and when dad would let me I took our 54, four door white Chevrolet and took Judy on a date(I also taught Judy how to drive in that 54 stick shift Chevy out on the Red Ribbon road). In late 1959 Dad bought a brand new 1959 white ford, it was a sharp looking car. Sense I was 17 by then, dad let me have the car more and more. Our dates consisted of going to the movie at Sedan and to the movie in Caney or the drive in movie at Caney. Right after Judy turned 16 and we started having car dates and going to the drive in movies, Judy's dad made us take her little brother Billy with us. After feeding him pop and popcorn, Judy would make Billy go to sleep in the back seat. In the late fall 59 Hopi told me about a good deal on a car that was for sale in Independence so Tony and I hitchhiked to Independence to look at it. The next week Judy and I went over and picked it up. I paid 175$ for a 1950 cream colored Chevrolet. It was my first car and it wasn't what you would call a cool car but it was transportation and I was glad to have it. One of the things we liked to do on our dates was to drive to Coffeyville ks. to the Dairy Lane on the east side of town and get a pork tender and then drive to west side of town to the Dairy Queen and get a ice e. The Highway from Peru to Coffeyville was completely different then than it is today. At that time it was about 7 miles longer and a whole lot rougher, and took about 4 hours there and back. A lot of times on our dates we would just drive to Sedan and cruise Main Street and then back to Peru and cruise main or sit on the hood of the car with other kids and watch the cars go by. Just before our senior year I bought a 1955 blue over white over blue Ford with white wheel covers, loud pipes and a horn that made music, now that was a cool car.

In late 1959 John Macmillan was elected Sheriff of Chautauqua co. Dad and John were friends and they also worked together in the oil fields. John asked dad to be his Under Sheriff. As I remember it Dad started his new job in Jan. 1960. What I remember most about dad being the under sheriff was that I would go with him whenever he was called out at night to work an accident or set on top of a hill , watching for tornadoes during a storm.

I wish I could say that our growing up in Peru was always having fun with our friends, dating and Halloween pranks, but it wasn't always that way. There were problems that we had to deal with. I had not intended to write about these problems but after discussing it with Judy, she told me that I probably ought to. Judy and I both have problems trying to remember the time frame when certain things happened and so I'm going to have to guess at some of it. One problem that Judy had to deal with all her life was that her father was a alcoholic and he was abusive. One of my first recollections of his alcoholism was, I think in late fall of 1959. Judy's Dad had opened a Cafe just across the highway west from the bank, at the time they lived east of town on the highway on a farm. Al, Judy�s father, had gone off on a drunk and was gone from Peru for quite some time. Because of this, Ruby (Judy�s Mother) moved the family to a house just south of, and next to the bank which was across the street from the caf� they operated. A few days after they moved Al came home. Beside the cafe was a parking lot where we kids liked to park and hang out. Late one evening about dark we were "hanging out" when I heard Al yell something. He was obviously drunk and I could see him staggering through the front door way of the house where Judy lived. My first thought was that he might hurt someone in the family and feeling quite macho, I walked across the street and up to the front gate. It was getting dark and I could only see Al's outline in the doorway. When I got to the front gate I hollered "AL". He immediately swung toward me and I saw a flash and heard a bang. It didn't take me long to figure out that he had fired a gun at me, and it didn't take me long to retrace my steps back across the street. In the mean time Ruby and the kids went out the back door. I met them at the corner of the bank and they took refuge at a neighbor�s house and I called the sheriff. The sheriff, a highway patrolman and Al's brother Ishmal came down from Sedan and they sat and waited for Al to sober up. Ruby left him for a while but eventually went back to him.

One day early in 1960 just before Judy's seventeenth birthday she was working in her dad�s cafe. Her dad was mad at her about something and he hit her across the face with the back of his hand and knocked her against the wall. That was the last straw, Judy had had enough. She went to the county judge in Sedan and got a court order allowing her to move away from home at age 16. She got a job at the Hospital at Sedan on the evening shift making 50 cents an hour and rented a one room upstairs apartment for 30 dollars month. Every school morning she rode to school with Mrs. Coker, or one of the other teachers who livid in Sedan but were teaching school in Peru. Judy had to be at work at the hospital by 3 PM. One little problem was that school didn't let out until 3:30. She asked permission from the principle to leave school at 2:30 and I got permission to leave at the same time and take her to work at Sedan. I then came back to school and went to basketball or football practice. Judy kept active in her cheer leading and sports and going to all the school functions. Every night at 11 PM, I drove to Sedan (7 miles) and picked Judy up from the hospital and took her home. Judy bought her own clothes, paid her own bills and bought her own food. This is the way we spent our last year and one half of high school. One note about Judy's upstairs apartment. A elderly lady, Mrs. Hess who rented the apartment to Judy was a some what old fashioned woman. Judy was not married so she was not allowed to entertain young gentlemen such as myself. Mrs. Hess always sat at a window right beside Judy's front downstairs door and she never let me get past that door.

I proposed to Judy on the steps of a little Baptist church in Chautauqua Ks. and gave her a engagement ring in front of a fire place in a pretty little restaurant in Caney. I gave Judy the engagement ring right after I turned 17 in our Jr. year of high school. I know we looked young, immature and foolish to our parents and other adults, and of course we were. But to us, all we knew was we were in love. Somehow we defied the odds and here we are over forty five years later with a very strong and happy marriage. I think one of the biggest factors that made our marriage work was how we learned to rely on each other during that last year and one half before we were married.

About three weeks before the end of our senior year in 1961, my granddad and grandmother let Judy move in with them so she could quit work and attend all the school activities, graduation activities, and Senior trip. About that time Granddad became rather seriously ill and was put in the hospital. Judy worked her last shift at the hospital and then sat up with granddad all night.

Our senior class trip was quite interesting, our destination was New Orleans. Thirteen seniors, our sponsor William Oxford, a teacher and bus driver Barney Mecom and his wife loaded on a bus and headed south. After a very long day our first stop for the night was the Faun tan bleu motel Shreveport La. We got in late and the sponsors started looking for someplace to take us to eat. The motel manager recommended a very nice place just down the road; it was called the Stork Club. We put on suits or the best clothes we had with us and we went to the club. As we walked in to this "restaurant" I felt a little uneasy and some what out of place like something was wrong. They had a table reserved for us right directly in front of a stage. We sat down and ordered. Just after we got our order a man came out on stage and everyone clapped and when he got to the mike he launched into a raunchy lewd comic routine using words us naive little country hicks from southeast Kansas had never heard before little alone used. As soon as he was finished a girl came on stage dressed in a outfit of feathers and jewels and began a strip routine. The girls were a little dumb struck, the teachers wanted to crawl under the table and the boys were having a ball. I think the boys realized long before the girls figured it out that what we were about to see our first striptease, and we did. Our sponsors were embarrassed of course, it had all happened so fast and unexpected. They just didn't know what to do. I'm sure they were thinking, �what are their parents going to say when the kids get back and tell them what we've done". The next day we headed for Orleans. We got there about dark and the first thing we did was head straight to the French Quarter and drove down Bourbon street in our big yellow bus(closed to traffic today). If you have ever been to Bourbon street you know it's one long street filled with striptease (in 1961-not today) joints and bars with hawkers standing outside, opening the doors to give you a peak of what was going on inside and trying to get you to come in. The next day we toured the French quarter on foot and along with the river front where we watched the river boats slide up and down the Mississippi. That night we had dinner in the Court Of The Two Sisters, a restaurant in the middle of the French Quarter. (Forty years later Judy and I(along with Connie and Rodger, Judy's sister and her husband) ate at that same restaurant just before our fortieth wedding anniversary). The following day we swam in Lake Pontchartrain, and then we headed back to Kansas.

About the only thing I remember about our graduation night was that we had white gowns and Judy and I stood next to each other in line, oh! and one other thing, Judy's youngest brother Johnny was born on the same night.

Graduation over, Judy and I planned our marriage for Friday the 9th of June. Because relations with Judy's parents was some what strained, we decided to have our wedding at Preacher Allen's home (the local pastor of the Assembly of God church and father of a class mate). Mom had ordered me a wool suit from Sears And Roebuck for my graduation. I put on that suit and Judy wore her beautiful prom dress. I stopped at Granddads house to pick up Judy. While there, some of our friends put black shoe polish (most of it never did come off) and shaving cream on our car. We then went to my parents house where mom took one (1) picture of us and then we, Mom, Dad, and my sister Janet, went to preacher Allen's house for the 7 PM ceremony. Preacher Allen was nervous during the ceremony and didn't give me a chance to say I do. He just kept on going. Judy said I do and to me that's all that mattered. After the ceremony I gave the preacher five of the last nine dollars I had to my name. After the wedding we drove up and down the highway in town a couple of times and then headed to Sedan to the two room apartment we had rented for 35$ a month which was next to the one Judy had been living in. We were afraid the kids might chivalry us so we parked the car in Mrs. Hess's garage so they wouldn't know we were there. The next morning Judy and I both got up at 6:AM and she took me to work, then she tried to wash off the shoe polish off the car.

The week before we got married I had gotten a job at 1$ an hour working in the oil fields for Appleby Young as a "Rod Wrencher" on what�s called a Pulling Unit. The next morning after our wedding was my very first day on the job. As jobs go it had to have been at the absolute bottom of the job chain. It was hard physical labor and every night I came home absolutely covered with oil from top to bottom. We lived in that upstairs apartment until it got so hot we couldn't stand it anymore. Judy had gone to work at greens cafe as a waitress so we found another upstairs apartment that was air-conditioned. It cost 65$ a month. (Yes I actually do remember all these prices). It was in this apartment that Judy talked me into starting our first child(Sept. 61). One of the problems with my job was that we couldn't work when it was raining or muddy and it rained quite bit that year. On my off days I liked to go to the pool hall in Peru and play pitch with the old men that played there every day. We played HIGH, LOW, JACK AND THE GAME for a quarter each hand (I usually "borrowed" Judy's tip money to play). That fall we moved to the west side of a duplex directly behind the Ranch Cafe in Sedan.

Winter was coming, Judy was Pregnant, I was in a dead end Job and I was earnestly looking for other employment. Jobs were hard to find in 1961. A classmate and friend had joined the Air Force the year before and I started thinking about doing the same thing. I drove to Independence where the recruiter was and asked him what kind of money I would be making. He told me I would take home 72$ a month and the government would send my wife 98$ a month. After our first child was born she would get another 7$. While in basic training he told me, my food, housing, and clothes would be paid for and I really wouldn't need any money for the first 8 weeks. That was about the same monthly wage I was making in the oil field so I decided to join.

It was the hardest thing in my life that I've ever had to do. I left Judy standing on the railroad platform in Independence Ks. waving goodbye and I headed out for Kansas City on the train to join the United States Air Force. On December the 19, 1961 in Kansas city Mo. I was sworn in to the U.S.A.F. Judy stayed at the duplex until the first of Jan. and then moved in with my parents. All the inductees sworn in at KC were put on a train and shipped to Lackland AFB TX. for basic military training(BMT).

The first thing they did at Lackland was to give us all a hair cut (I had a flat top so there wasn't much to cut). They issued our uniforms and then �marched� us to our barracks. The first order of business was to get us out of our civvies and into our fatigues. Right after they told us to get dressed into our fatigues they called us out of the barracks for roll call and most of us didn't have our hats on. In the Air Force to be out doors without the appropriate cover is a absolute no no. They sent us back into the barracks to get our hats. All our clothes were still stuffed in our duffel bags and I had just started digging through my bag to find my hat when they ordered us back outside again. Their were five of us that still didn't have our caps on so they sent us back in to try again. Before I could find mine they ordered us outside again. This time I was the only one that didn't have a hat. They sent me back inside. This time the two of the T. I.'s (Technical Instructors-Our trainers) followed me. They threw me up against the wall and one of them got in my face and screamed at me. I think they thought I might be a trouble maker, so I explained that I just couldn't find my hat. They let me look again and this time I found it. I went back outside feeling very much like �Toto�in the Wizard of Oz ,and I wasn't in Kansas anymore.

Most of my memories about BMT are kind of hazy, probably because I've tried to block them out. I do have some very vivid memories that have stuck in my mind through the years. I remember the countless hours of marching and drilling and learning my left face from my right. I remember the obstacle courses and gas masks we used in the tear gas building. I remember crawling under the barbed wire with gun fire over our heads and standing at attention while the T.I. tore our lockers apart. I remember doing push ups until I wanted to throw up and spit polishing my boots until they shined like a mirror. The one and foremost memory that stands out in my mind is the day I got my first pay check. It's remained a source of bitterness against the military ever since, and it caused Judy and I to live in near poverty for the next two years. One of my biggest concerns before I enlisted was that I wanted to make sure I would be able to make enough money to support my family. After two weeks at Lackland I got my first pay check, it was six dollars and twelve cents. I was flabbergasted. I soon found out some things that the recruiter failed to tell me(Recruiters lying to enlistees is something that has probably gone on sense the time of the Roman Legions but it still doesn't make it right ). He failed to tell me that half of my pay was going to be taken and be included as part of the 98 dollars that the government sent Judy. They took out for the hair cut, the photo they took of us to send home, and monthly payments to pay for the clothes they issued us. Out of the six dollars and twelve cents, I was required to buy all my toiletries for the next two weeks, toothpaste, soap, shampoo. Out of my first pay check I was hoping to send some money home to Judy because she wouldn't be getting a check for another 60 days. That didn't happen and it made me feel very guilty. I'm going to digress a little bit and give a short history lesson. The Department of labor began compiling statistics about poverty in the United States. They finally established a dollar amount that constituted the poverty level. Eventually some ingenious bureaucrat realized that the US government was forcing a large amount of its own military to live under the poverty level, namely the lower ranked enlisted men who were married and supported a family. Eventually the congress moved the rectify this injustice and Judy and I benefited from some of it just before I was discharged in 1965.

One of the strongest memories I have about BMT was KP(kitchen patrol, or working in the kitchen). We were required to pull KP once a week at various dinning halls around the base at Lackland. All KP is bad, but KP at one particular chow hall was horrible and we had to pull it twice. It was the Base Officer Transit chow hall. The day of KP started at 4:30 AM. We marched to our own chow hall to eat breakfast and then marched across the base to the transit hall. The Chow hall opened at 6 AM and we had to be in place and ready. The first time we were at that dinning hall my job was to clean the garbage off the plates and pass the plates on to be put in the dish washer. Soon after 6 AM the trays began coming in. Their were six of us doing that job and it was all we could do to keep up. We worked frantically to keep up until 1 PM when they gave us a 30 minute lunch break and then again at 7 P.M. when they gave us a 30 minute dinner break. The hall closed at 8:30 PM, we then had to clean up the kitchen, and mop all of the dinning hall. My clothes became completely caked with garbage. It was caked in my hair, my eye brows and in my ears. In the cool night air marching back to the barracks my fatigues became so stiff it was hard to walk. They made us take off our clothes before we went into the barracks. At 10:30 we fell in bed only to get up a 5:00 the next day and start all over again. I've always understood the need to install discipline in the military and agree with the way they go about it, but there can be a fine line where the need to teach good discipline changes over to just the need for slave labor.

Basic Military Training in the Air Force at Lackland was supposed to last 8 weeks, unless they decided to send you to a technical school for specialized training. If you were selected to go to school, your stay at Lackland would be only five weeks. After you got to the base where your school was located you would finish BMT at the school by going to school a half day and BMT a half day. Every Airman was required to receive the same amount of hrs.of BMT(Basic Military Training) . After five weeks in Lackland I received orders to go to Machinist school at Rantoul Air Force Base, Chanute Ill. When I first got my orders I asked someone next to me what a Machinist was and he said you know, someone who cuts metal. My reply was "you can't cut metal" (I was a just a small town boy from Ks.}.

Five weeks after I got to Lackland by train, I left Lackland by train. This time they put me in a wonderful sleeper car. After sleeping in a barracks with 50 men in the same room on a hard bunk bed and getting up at 5 A.M most mornings, the sleeper bed was just marvelous. I would have slept all the way to Illinois but the steward wouldn't let me.

I have been two places in my life that made me totally depressed. Rantoul AFB was one and the other was the four months I spent in Japan. I got to the barracks at Rantoul at night, it was cold with snow on the ground. I walked into the barracks they had assigned me and the heat in the barracks was stifling. My bunk was next to a crack in the wall and I could see outside, which explained why they had to have the heat so high. The next day I found out that they called the Squadron I was assigned to the suicide squadron because two people had killed themselves in the last three months. I was only 19 and I was very much homesick, as were all of the other kids in the barracks. We were all strangers and it was hard to make new friends. At least at Lackland they kept you so busy you didn't have time to think about it. We sloshed back and forth to school every day in the snow and mud, and every night we returned to the loneliness of the those depressing barracks. Evidently my depression was expressed in my letters to Judy because she decided to come to Rantoul. She cashed a 100$ US savings bond someone had given us for a wedding gift and got on a bus, my mother came with her. On a Friday afternoon after BMT I was notified by the CQ (Charge Of Quarters) that my wife was at the base enlisted men's transit hotel so I put on my class A's and went to the hotel. The last time Judy had seen me I was weighed 130 Lb.s. , Sense then I had gained 35 Lb's. and now I was 165 Lb's. Judy had also gained weight and looked huge, she was now six months pregnant. When I left home she wasn't showing. Mom stayed another day and after I had taken her on a tour of some of the sights on the base she returned home.

Judy became acquainted with a girl that was also at the hotel for the same reason (Katy Cox from Love Ga.). They rented a trailer house together in the city of Rantoul, and every weekend, Sparky, Katy's husband and I would stay in the trailer with them. We could not live off base until we had finished our BMT classes which would take another four weeks.

One Friday I was at BMT class in a gym doing calisthenics. The common practice was that after they let us go we would form up ranks outside the gym, march back to our squadron area and be dismissed for the weekend. This one particular Friday evening it was raining like crazy and it was cold. We were standing out in the rain getting soaked to the bone waiting for everyone to come out of the gym so we could march back to our squadron area. We stood and waited for along time in the cold rain. One by one people began to leave the formation without being dismissed. I had decided I would stay, until Sparky drove up in his car. Sparky opened the door, Judy and Katy were inside and it looked a whole lot dryer in the car than it did where I was standing, so I got in and we left. A T.I. saw what was happening and he brought everyone still standing in formation back inside the building and took role call. To make a long story short, there was a big stink about it, and all of us that left formation were given an Article 15, which is an official reprimand that went on our permanent record. My Squadron commander said he thought it was a big to do about nothing but he didn't have any choice but to put the reprimand on my record. In the long run it didn't seem to hurt me because during my four years in the Air Force I attained the highest rank that was possible for an enlisted Airman in his first four year enlistment. (A1C-E4).

Just before BMT was finished and I was still living in the barracks, I was appointed barracks chief which meant I was in charge of making sure the barracks were kept clean among other things . One Monday morning, after spending the weekend with Judy, I got back to the barracks about 2 AM. I had left orders that the barracks were to be cleaned on Sunday evening. I wanted them to do that so we wouldn't have so much to do when we got up at 5 AM on Monday morning. When I got to the barracks, the barracks were filthy. I had the CQ start beating on a garbage can lid and I started blowing a whistle, which was the usual way of getting everyone up in the morning. I walked up and down the halls urging everyone to get up and start cleaning because we were going to be late for role call. We were about finished cleaning when someone said his watch must be broke because he had only 3:30 AM, and someone else said he had the same. I then told them they could go back to bed but the next time I told them to clean the barracks on Sunday evening they better do it.(A little power can go to your head especially when your young).

After BMT was finished I applied for and got separate rations, which meant the government would pay me 1 $ a day for not eating in the government chow hall. Judy and I found an upstairs apartment for 65 $ a month which was more than we could afford. Making ends meet at that time was really tough. One time at the end of the month all we had to eat in the house was pancake mix which Judy mixed with water. We also had some onions our landlord had given us from his garden.(Before we left Rantoul my weight was back down to 130lbs). Once, just before a particular important inspection I needed a hair cut but I didn't have the fifty cents that it took to get one. About two blocks from where we lived was another couple much like we were. I walked over to their house and asked if I could borrow fifty cents so I could get a hair cut, but he also was broke. A couple hours later, he and his wife showed up at our apartment with the fifty cents. He said there parents had given them some savings bonds so they took one and cashed it in. We became friends, and after we left Rantoul we corresponded. Over the years we lost contact and today I can't even remember their names.

Wherever we went when we were on duty, we had to march as a unit. When marching, a squadron is made up of two or more flights, and a flight is a group of a unspecified number with a max of 48 people. The men who lived in the barracks called those that didn't live in the barracks (like me)"separate rats" because we were receiving separate rations. They also called us separate rats out of jealousy and pity. Being separate rats meant we got to live off base with our wives which was a whole lot better than living in the barracks. But on the other hand it meant we looked like a bunch of rats. Let me explain; If you lived with your wife off base it usually meant you didn't have enough money to send your fatigues to the base laundry to be cleaned, pressed and starched to military standards. As a result the men who were separate rats looked considerably less military than those who lived in the barracks. The separate rats always had to march in the last flight in the squadron. One side benefit of this was that the T.I.'s left us alone because they felt sorry for us.

Judy was scheduled to have our first child about the time I was scheduled to graduate from tech. school. For a while we wondered which event would arrive first. The last of May I graduated and the Air force gave me more than enough travel pay to buy both Judy and I train tickets home for a two week leave. My new orders said I would be stationed at Cannon AFB, Clovis NM. We took the train to St. Luis Mo. where we missed the connection with the train to Kansas City which resulted in a 7 hour layover. Judy was 9 months pregnant but she looked 10. It was hot and she was very uncomfortable so I asked the railroad sales people if there was any where she could lay down or if their was anything they could do to help. They said no. We were traveling with fellow tech school grad and a friend. He got mad at the railroad people and jumped all over them and made a big scene. They finally let us board our train early, it was just setting in the station running and waiting to go to KC with it's air-conditioning on. We knew we were going to miss our connection in KC, so I called dad and he drove to Kansas city and picked us up at the union station and took us to Peru where my parents were living at the time.

About a week after we got to Peru, Dr. Walker at Sedan attempted to start Judy's labor pains so we could have The baby while we were home with our family. It took three trips to the hospital and a lot of false labor before it worked, but Tim finally popped out.

The plan was this. Because I didn't know exactly what I was getting into in Clovis New Mexico, I was going to take the train to Clovis, get situated and then return to Sedan and get Judy and Tim. The first part of the plan went well, I went to Clovis, reported in and went to work. I found a place for us to live and the next weekend I took the train back to Wellington Kansas where Judy and Dad picked me up. We loaded our 55 ford with every thing we could get in it and headed out for Clovis. Some where around Hereford TX. The generator on the car quit working. A local garage gouged me for 24 dollars for repairs that should have cost only 10. By this time we were getting pretty low on money with all the travailing we had been doing and I only had a few dollars left(no credit cards in those days). 30 miles outside of Clovis the car started making a loud POPPING noise, like a gun going POP; POP; POP.. One thing I have never been is a mechanic, and I had no idea what was making the popping sound. Having no money left we had no choice but to keep going, hoping the car would make it to Clovis. As we drove into Clovis we drove by a line of tall grain elevators. As we drove by the grain elevators, the sound of the POP; POP; POPPING from the car echoed and sounded even louder. We went to the place where I thought we had a apartment rented, but they had rented it to someone else. I didn't know what we were going to do because by this time we were completely out of money. We found an ad in the news paper that had apartments for rent. We drove to the address with the car POP; POP; POPPING. I asked the landlady if there was any way we could rent an apartment without any money. She said she would take a post dated check. I told her we didn't have a checking account in Clovis yet, but we had one in Sedan Kansas. She said that would be fine. We moved into a one room and kitchenette apartment in a old rundown Mexican style hacienda that cost 55 dollars a month.(we were there in 1990 with our video camera and Judy wouldn't let me film the place) The next day I went to a pawn shop and pawned Judy's silverware(real silver)that she had bought before we were married. During the next three and one half years we and the pawn shop took turns keeping the silverware, they kept it last. I arranged to get a ride back and forth to the base and after everything finely settled down and I had time to look under the hood of the car, I found that a spark plug had came loose and was hanging on the end of a spark plug wire. I screwed it back in and the car was fine.

Clovis is a town of about 25,000 people in eastern New Mexico and is surrounded by sand and sage brush. It's hot, dry and dusty in the summer and cold dry and dusty in winter with an occasional snow storm. The only surface water in a radius of ninety mile was a small pond in the city park and one on the golf course on the base. The two things I missed most when we livid in Clovis was water and grass. A couple of times we drove 90 miles to a lake south of Amarillo TX. and camped over night because we were so hungry for the sight of water. According to the map there was a state park just south of Clovis called Oasis State Park. We figured there must be water there but as it turned out it was only a camping spot with a drinking fountain. Once I spent hours digging up our front yard to plant grass in the sand. No grass grew. While in Clovis we lived in seven different apartments and two houses. Two months after we moved into our first apartment, we moved next door into a two room apartment for 60$ a month and five months after that we moved to a duplex for 60$ a month.

Cannon AFB is ten miles west of Clovis. I was assigned to the 27th field maintenance squadron of the 27th TAC fighter wing. Our wing had 16 F100 jet fighters. We had two wings on the base with a total of 32 fighters. I was a machinist and I worked in a machine shop that had lathe's, mills, drill presses and other tools that machine shops have. A lot of my time was taken up with removing broken bolts and striped screws from the panels of the skin of the aircraft. At times we had to remove the panels out on the flight line while the Jet engines were running, ready for take off. There was no part of the air craft that I didn't work on, including the cock pit. One person working in the cock pit accidentally pulled the ejection seat lever and was sent about 300 feet in the air. There were a lot of accidents; there were a lot of air plane crashes. Every time there was a crash someone had to go pick up the pieces, and I got commandeered into picking up two of these crashed aircraft. One of them was a fighter that crashed inside the city limits of Clovis in a vacant lot. The pilot got a medal for guiding his plane into the vacant lot thereby saving a lot of lives. Only problem was he had bailed out 12 miles away. All of this was exciting for a young 20 year old and I enjoyed the work. We generally worked eight hours a day five days a week and about every third weekend we had to be available for emergency calls. One exception was the Cuban missile(Oct. 62) crises when we were put on twelve hour shifts seven day a week, but the alert didn't last very long.

Not long after we moved into our third apartment which was beside a busy street, Judy and I were awakened early one morning by red lights flashing across our bedroom wall. I got up and looked out the window and there were three police cars on the road where I usually parked my car. We got dressed and went outside and discovered that a drunk driver had hit our beautiful 55 Ford in the front end, knocking it into a tree and then shoving it over a stop sign(We never did understand why we didn't hear the wreck which was only 20 feet from the head of our bed). The car was completely totaled. The driver was an Airman from the base. The Airman was from back east somewhere and so was his insurance company. We went six months without transportation.

One time during that six months with out a car, I was required to pull KP at the base chow hall.(All Airman had to pull KP until they were raised to the rank of A2C, even those like me who didn't eat in the base chow hall). After I got home that evening I got terribly sick. It was coming out both ends and I thought I was going to die. That night a horrible blizzard blew into Clovis, and the roads and side walks were slick with ice and blowing snow. Judy had no way of taking me to the base hospital and since we didn�t have a phone, she walked 12 blocks across town in that blowing snowstorm at night to ask the only person we knew that had a car to take me to the hospital. The Doctor said I had gotten food poisoning from the chow hall and he gave me a shot which gave me instant relief. I was released late the next day. (Right after this I was promoted to A2C).

We made repeated calls trying to get the insurance to take care of our wrecked car, but nothing ever happened. I finally went to a lawyer at the Judge Advocates office to see if they could get anything done. It wasn�t long before an insurance adjuster showed up at our house and wanted to know if there was much damage to the car. We were paid 350 dollars for the car and he let me keep the old car which I sold for 95 dollars. We bought another 55 Ford almost like the one we had.

The Air Force base at Cannon supported other bases around the world. By that I mean our base would send aircraft, equipment, and personnel to other bases around the world on a temporary basis for various reasons. These were called TDYs(for temporary duty's). The men in the machine shop were sent out on these TDY's on a rotational basis. My first turn came when the Air force and Army conducted joint maneuvers with the Iranian Army and Air Force In Iran. It was only to be a two week exercise and I was excited that my first experience at flying would be a trip around the world. We left Cannon on a C 130 Cargo Air craft with our first stop to be Iceland. The plane was not equipped for passengers, there was no where to set. We had to lay or sit on the equipment or the baggage on the plane. I spent a lot of time in the cockpit watching the landscape of Ohio, Indiana and Canada go by. When we got ready to land in Iceland I stayed close to the cockpit so I could watch us land. There were no seats and therefore no seat belts. When we came down through the clouds it was snowing and all I could see was white. We kept descending lower and lower and still all I could see was white, and then out on what looked like the horizon was a dark stripe and at first I didn't know what it was at first. As we got closer I began to realize that the stripe was the air strip where we were going to land. There wasn't any buildings in sight, just a black stripe. After we landed we taxied to our parking area and got off our plane and walked about a fifty yards to a snow tunnel. We then walked another hundred yards through the snow tunnel to a chow hall where they fed us and gave us a lunch box with a cheese sandwich, an apple and some "C rations". They had refueled our aircraft so we got back on the plane and took off for the next stop, Madrid Spain. The C 130 air craft is a relatively large plane with four turbo prop engines. Inside it's hollow like one big large long room with no seats. If we laid or sat on the cargo that was in the middle of the plane, it was hot and loud. If we stayed in the back, in the tail section, it was cold and quiet. We spent most of our time going back and forth.

In Spain we had a five hour layover. Three of us got on a bus that took us outside the base (how they ever let us through the gate I don't know) and through downtown Madrid. We got on another bus and went back to the base, got on the plane and took off for Turkey. In Turkey we landed and taxied to a parking area that was between two run ways. We got off the plane and sat in the sand under a wing, ate the meals they had brought us and watched the jets take off and land on both sides of us. They refueled our plane and we took off for Iran.

Everyone knows that most of Iran is desert, what most people don�t understand is just how bad a desert it really is. The desert where we were, made the desert around Clovis look like a child's sand box. Once a cloud of thick red dust settled in over the area and reduced visibility to about 30 ft. They told us that several hundred miles away there had been a wind storm that had lifted the dust into the upper winds that brought it to us. We could see it coming for miles, it slowly settled in like a descending curtain of red fog. I don't remember if they were mosquitoes or gnats or what they were but the flying insects were so bad we had to surround our bunks with mosquito netting so we could at least have some relief at night.

We were told to never get off the beaten path and never lift up a rock because of the snakes. Never, never walk barefooted and always check your boots before putting them on (Scorpions). Oh yes, never check in your boots with your hands. Other than a few miner things like these it was a pretty nice place.

The Iranians had made their own NCO's(Non Commissioned Officers) set up tents out in the desert somewhere and gave us their barracks. The Armies 82ed Air Born moved in across the road from us, also in tents. While we were there the Air Force only required my services twice, so it gave me plenty of time for other activities like playing poker and black jack.

The Air Force brought in hundreds of cases of beer and soft drinks for it's personnel. The logistic planners only forgot one small detail. There was absolutely no ice on the whole base but that didn't keep people from consuming a lot of it.

The Iranians had a out door movie theater on the base and one the first nights in Iran all of us were encouraged to go to the movie. The movie was the �King And I� staring Yul Brenner(None of it was in English). The Iranians had set up a stage in front of the movie screen and after the movie an Iranian General gave us a little speech welcoming us to his country. After the speech they put on a show. Several Iranian men dressed in silky balloon lagged pants with turbines on their heads, danced what most of us thought was a silly fairy dance with swords and silk scarves. After the dance we all clapped and cheered wildly. I think we all thought that we needed to do our part for international relations.

The Iranians had prepared several different short tours for us to take if we wanted to. They wanted to show off their country. One trip was to a excavation site where they said they were excavating Daniel's Tomb(Daniel of the Bible). We also toured a large 15th century castle, which really looked out of place setting out in the dessert by itself. They took us to a new Hydro Electric Dam; they said it was the fourth largest in the world. When we were leaving the dam site I was setting in back of the bus. The driver backed up to the edge of a cliff. I looked out and down from the back window and I could see rocks falling down the cliff caused the back bus tires when they got to close to the edge. That really shook me up. The thought hit me that I could actually die in this God forsaken country and never see my family again.

The only way I can explain the county side and the civilian population in Iran in 1963 is to say it was Biblical. It looked like everyone had just come off the movie set Ben Hur. Hump backed little men holding on to ropes hooked to donkeys loaded down with fire wood. Women with long robes with their heads covered. There were men actually making bricks like it says in the Bible, stomping in red mud and adding straw (the barracks we stayed in were made out of those bricks). Everywhere we went there was little children running around us. They weren't begging, they were Just curious. Old women always seemed to be chasing the children with switches. I asked a guide about the old woman and he said that they weren't old women, they were the kids mothers. Women age quickly in the hard life of the desert.

The 82 Air borne made a parachute jump several miles out in the desert. A lot of Air Force personal, including me rode out in buses to watch it. The jump was a beautiful thing to see. It looked like thousands of white handkerchiefs floating in the sky. It made me happy that I had joined the Air For and not the Army. About three days after the jump, the first elements of the 82ed began to filter back into their camp. They came into our chow hall looking for food. One of our gripes had been about how lousy the food was while we were there. When the Army came in they didn't have their mess kits so they had the cooks just pour the food mixed together in their helmets and they ate it with their fingers. A lot of us let them borrow our mess kits and after that we didn't gripe anymore.

I don't remember anything at all about the trip home from Iran, all I remember is when I got home Judy and Tim had been sick and my mother had rode the bus from Sedan to stay with them. At this time we lived at 316 Axtel in an apartment.(that's the only whole address I remember).

Judy had two jobs while were in Clovis. When we lived on 13th street in a little house,(about a half block west of main) Judy worked next door in a Pizza place. She brought home pizza every night. She also worked in a nursing home. She was working in the nursing home just before and during the time I was in Japan.

November 1963. I was walking across the field that was between our shop where I worked and the headquarters building. Someone passed me by and said the President had been shot. I thought he was joking until I got to HQ and my first sergeant confirmed that the President had been shot while in Dallas Tex.. I returned to the shop and everyone was setting in the front office listing to the radio. We listened for awhile about what had happened and then the announcer said those words I have heard repeated a hundred times sense. " LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATED IS DEAD". The nation went into morning. The Base Commander canceled all flight operations and we were all sent home until after the funeral. Judy and I were watching television when they brought Lee Harvey Oswald through that basement when Jack Ruby jumped out and shot him. We were in tears along with the rest of the nation when John Jr. saluted his father�s casket. It was a very sad time.

A really strange thing happened one evening while we livid in that little house on 13th street. One night we had a knock on our door. The visitors were some of our friends and they had with them someone who accused me of steeling his motorbike. He said that I had stolen his motorbike and put it on the rail road track and let it get run over by a train. I had seen this guy on the base occasionally but I didn't know him and I sure didn't know he had a motorbike. He kept insisting that I was a thief, and he wanted to fight. I tried to explain that I didn't know what he was talking about. Finely after about 30 minutes of arguing I became frustrated and said O K, if you want to fight we'll fight. We went to a vacant lot next door and began to fight. After he got a bloody nose and a split lip, he calmed down. When he left he was feeling quite contrite. I told him again that I didn't steel his bike, but to this day I'll bet he still thinks I did.

Sometime in the summer of 1964, a drag shoot on an F100 jet fighter failed to deploy and the plane went through the safety barrier at the end of the run way and cracked a wing spare. Harold Jasper, a civilian machinist and I took a look at the wing spare to see if we could fix it. We spent about 50 hours working on the plane and used about $250.00 worth of material. Afterwards the plane was returned to service(we fixed something that had never been fixed before). As it turned out, what we did saved the Air Force about 25 thousand dollars(the cost of a new wing, a lot of money in those days). As a result of saving the Air force that kind of money, Harold and I were selected for a special award. We were selected as one of top ten Cost Saving Recognition Awards the Air Force was giving out that year. The special award was to be presented at a special ceremony at Wright Patterson Air Force base in Dayton Ohio. It was after this , that I was promoted to A1C.

In October, the Air Force flew Harold and I to Dayton Ohio to attend the award ceremony via civilian airline. They put Harold in the base officers quarters and put me in a rather run down room in the Airman's transit hotel. I was just about settled in when an officer came and got me (evidently someone finely figured out why I was there) and put me in the base NCO quarters which was 1000 percent better. They gave all the recipients of the award a guided tour of the Air Force museum that is at Wright Patterson Air Force base and the next day we attended the awards Ceremony. In attendance at the ceremony were several generals(about 40) and staff officers(about 300) representing the different commands of the Air Force. To be giving the awards was Assistant secretary of the Air Force Robert H. Charles and Air Force Chief of Staff and Four Star General Curtice E. LeMay. General LeMay was considered one of the Heroes of W.W.II. He was the architect of the fire bombing of Japan. He also instituted the Strategic Air Command and the modern Air force of that day. In a briefing before the awards ceremony with the protocol officer someone asked if we were supposed to salute General LeMay when he presented the award to us. He said saluting at ceremony was optional. I decided that I wanted to be able to say that I had once saluted General Curtice E. LeMay. I saluted him, he gave me the award, shook my hand and said "good job son".

Secretary Charles shook my hand, said congratulations and I went and stood by a 4 ft. by 8 ft. placard that had Harold and my name on it. On the placard was a detailed description of what Harold and I had done. They said the placard had been hanging in the concourse of the Pentagon.

Our best friends while we were in Clovis were June and Pat Pendegrass. Pat was a fellow Airman and a native of New Mexico from Truth Or Consequences (That's the real name of the town). He took me deer hunting one weekend in New Mexico's mountains east of Truth Or Consequences. We didn't see a deer all weekend. As we were coming back out of the mountains and driving down the road in his white Ford pickup, we were driving slow and I had my 30-30 rifle between my legs because we thought we might yet see a deer. We had just driven out of a series of curves and cliffs and was heading down a long straightway when a wheel came rolling by me on the passenger side. It rolled out in front of the pickup and then down into the right ditch and off into a field. I lifted my 30-30 up to my shoulder and took aim at the tire as if I was going to shoot. Pat said DON'T SHOOT, DON�T SHOOT. My reply was, WHY NOT, IT'S THE ONLY MOVING TARGET I'VE SEEN ALL WEEK END. That was something we kidded about for a long time. (The lug nuts had come off the rear wheel of the pick up and the pickup kept moving with just three wheels).

In the Middle of December 1964 I was on my way to Japan on another TDY, (They called it "temporary duty" so they wouldn't have to pay us "overseas pay" but of course they took away our separate rations pay because we were eating in the government chow hall again) we were supposed to be gone for three months. We were in Northern Japan at a place called Masawaw AFB on the northern end of the main island just across the Tsugaru Strait from the northern island of Hokkaido. The weather was always cloudy, cold and snowy. At times there was 30" of snow on the ground and there was earth tremors everyday. There wasn't much to do except work all day and hang around at the BX all evening. The high point of my day was going to the post office to see if I had any mail from Judy. The mail usually came in three or four letters at a time and then nothing for several days. Judy wrote me everyday while I was there and that wasn't enough. It was a terribly lonely time.

My barracks was next to the Japanese barracks and every morning they would blow a bugle the Japanese would muster outside and go through a sword and stick ritual. We had individual rooms, the thin walls were open at the top and bottom with a swinging door. A Japanese maid came in everyday and cleaned my room for two dollars a week. I had a radio but the only English station was the Armed forces Radio station which played the same song at the same time everyday. One of the songs they played most was "When I Come Home To You San Francisco. (San Francisco was the city all military personnel used to go through on their way home from the Middle east).

The Japanese had a short ski slope near the base and it was lighted at night. I tried to ski it once but spent most of the evening stuck in a snow bank.

In Japan there were a lot of prostitutes around the base and some of them offered more service than the norm. For the price of the rent and food you could have a roof over your head and all the comforts of home while you were in Japan. One of the men I worked with who was on permanent station at Masawaw took advantage of this convenience. He invited me to his �home� for a Sunday dinner and I went. It was kind of good for a change to get out of the barracks environment and into a home environment. They even had a TV which was the first one I had seen in two months, of course it was all in Japanese.

After being in the Air Force for almost three years I was no longer awed by the sound of the loud roaring engine of a Jet Fighter while on take off as I had once been. When you are around it everyday like I was, you got used to the noise, even to the point that you don't even hear it, at least not with the concise mind. But if something out of the ordinary takes place like a flame out, you immediately take notice. A flame out is when the engine shuts down in the middle of take off or flight. During my stay in the Air Force I heard two flame outs. One pilot crashed and was killed and the other bailed and survived. In Japan we had the roar of jet engines taking off almost constantly. Occasionally I would hear a roar that didn't quite fit in. It kind of sounded like a Jet engine but I knew it wasn't. I would ask myself �I wonder what that is�? One day at work the strange roar seemed to be louder than it had been so I asked one of the guys stationed on the base, �What is that�? He told me that the ocean was only about six miles from the base and that noise was the waves of the ocean crashing upon some near by cliffs. He told me I ought to go see it, it was quite a sight.

Sometime in early March when the weather began to break I rented a bicycle and rode to the ocean which seemed like more than six miles to me. I was walking down a path to the beach when I encountered a group of small Japanese boys playing in the water on a pond with homemade rafts. They were also playing some kind of board game in the sand. It was still pretty cool, but they were all bare foot. I said what I thought was good morning in Japanese and they all laughed and ignored me. I walked on toward the beach where gigantic waves coming in from the vast North Pacific Ocean were smashing against some nearby cliffs with thunderous power. The feeling was over powering. I had never heard or seen anything like this before. The noise was louder than ten jet engines. Being a simple boy from Kansas this completely awed and amazed me. Seeing something like that really makes a person stop and ponder his own insignificance in the vast big world we are in.

Time past very slowly while I was in Japan but eventually the three months was about gone. I arrived at work one morning and the first thing I heard was, "did you hear that because the North Vietnamese attacked our ships at someplace called the Gulf Of Tulcan, the President ordered a massive build up in Vietnam. They have taken the planes that were supposed to bring in our replacements and take us home and diverted them to other duties and were going to be stuck in Japan for another month�. At that time I thought I would be going home in another week. Eventually even the extra month passed, and our replacements arrived. Only one problem, the planes that were supposed to take us home didn't. Our replacements took our barracks and they put us in a large auditorium with bunk beds. We had about three hundred people in one room. The lights were always on, there was always noise from people playing poker and drinking beer. Smoke filled the air and foul smelling body oder filled your nose. It was almost impossible to sleep and there was absolutely no discipline. There wasn't anything to do besides gripe. We were in that miserable room for 7 days.

Finely our planes arrived (C135 Air Transports) and we headed home. We were supposed to fly non stop to Clovis. About half way through the flight we were told we were going to make a unscheduled landing in Hawaii. After we landed and as soon as they opened the door I knew something was different. The sweet smell of lush vegetation and warm salt sea air hit me in the face and actually took my breath. After spending seven days in that smoky stinking auditorium and several hours of the same on the plane, the wonderful smell of Hawaii was dramatically different. We got off the plane and discovered it was night(no windows on the plane). It was about midnight and there was no moon. it was completely dark and we couldn't see a thing. All I remember seeing were the head lights of the transport buses that came to pick us up. They took us to the terminal and had us wait. After about three hours we were told that one of the engines on our airplane had malfunctioned and they were going to have to fly another one in from the states. It would take about three days. The officer in charge told us that he didn't care what we did as long as we stayed out of trouble and reported in everyday at 0800. Three of us decided that sense we were in Hawaii, we wanted to swim on Waikiki beach. The first thing we needed to do was find our duffel bags and get our civilian clothes. They had unloaded our bags in a hanger and it took us about an hour to find our own. As soon as we changed into our civvies we headed for the front gate. At the front gate the guard told us that the buses didn't start running until 6 A.M. It was about four thirty and still completely dark. There was a bus bench about a block outside the gate by the highway. We sat on the bench talking about what we were going to do that day and waited for the bus. When we had left Japan just a few hours earlier, the skies were cloudy, the snow on the ground was starting it's spring thaw. All the roads were muddy, the snow was a dirty gray and everything just seemed dull, dingy, and depressing. Now we were in beautiful Hawaii although we hadn't seen any of it yet. Evan the stars we strained to see were blocked by a nearby street light. As we sat there excitedly chattering with each other about the coming events of the day, the day began to dawn as a slight glimmer of reddish orange subtly began to appear on the horizon. Slowly the glimmer changed to a bright reddish rim of valcanic looking lava color as if it was dancing out there on the edge of the earth. The sky began to brighten into a pale orange with just a hint of peach. One by one, streaks of light broke around the crags of a distant mountain, outlines of palm trees began to appear and the vegetation started glistening with sun light as it bounced and twinkled off it's morning dew. Our talking had completely ceased. White, yellow and blue flowers began to appear as if they were opening up just for us. A deep lush blanket of green seemed to spread out across the Vally below and smother the whole earth with it's iridescent glow. That sunrise was absolutely the most beautiful and glorious sunrise I have ever seen. We all sat there transfixed by what Mother Nature was unfolding before our eyes. We were completely oblivious to anything else going on around us. All of a sudden we heard something that sounded like a loud fog horn coming from behind us. We turned around and what we saw gave us all a jolt. An aircraft carrier was silently steaming by on the ocean. We didn't even know we were any where near the ocean and now, not only were we close to the ocean, there was one of the largest ships in the world right behind us. The ship probably wasn't nearly as close to us as it seemed at the time, but it looked so big, so powerful, so massive. It was hard to believe that something that big could be that close to us and yet move so quietly.

We got on the bus and went to Waikiki. We put on our swim suits and jumped in the warm beautiful clear waters of the Pacific ocean, We swam, we dove through the waves, we tried surfing, we chased land crabs and buried each other in the sand just like a bunch of little kids. I laid in the sand, soaked up as much sun as I could and looked up into the clear blue sky and thought, Just a few hours ago I was in a hell hole and now I'm in heaven. I have to admit, just for a little while I almost forgot how much I was missing Judy. The next day I toured Honolulu by bus and then we got back on the airplane and headed non stop for home.

When we landed at Cannon, they opened the plane door and cold reality hit us in the face. Actually it was the cold night air of late March in New Mexico. We then realized we had left our fatigue jackets in our duffel bags(no need for them in Hawaii). We got off the plane shaking and shivering. In 1990 when the Gulf war vets came home from Saudi Arabia they showed the troops on TV getting off the planes and running to meet their families. Not so with us. They had set up a processing table in a hanger and before we could go to our families we had to go through processing. All the time I was standing in line(about an hour) I could see Judy standing in the dark hanger in her black fur coat. All I wanted to do was run to her, pick her up in my arms, hug, kiss and ravage her. It was late at night, we had been away from our families for four months and when we got to the processing table they told us we had to report for duty at 0700 the next morning. Now that was cold reality. Something else that was real was Judy's warm loving arms and her sweet red lips. She had left Tim with a friend for the night, so we went home.

It was at that time that I earnestly began to look forward to getting out of the Air Force. I started marking off the days with a grease pencil on the duty board at work. I actually enjoyed Monday because I got to mark 3 days off all at once. About July after I got back, Judy and I decided we wanted to have another baby. Judy and I also began to start preparing for the time I was to be discharged. I bought a trailer and put aluminum sides and top on it and painted it black to match the black 1960 Mercury Comet we had bought before I had left for Japan. When I got back from Japan a rod was knocking on the Comet and taking it to the a garage was out of the question because we were still quite poor. I went to the Library and got a motor manual and followed the instructions religiously on how to over haul a Comet motor. We drove that Comet for about three more years.

It was at Cannon that I first took up golf. I don't remember why but I imagine it was because the golf course on the base was the only place where I could go to acutely walk on grass. It cost $1.25 to play nine holes and although things were better for us financially I couldn't afford to buy a golf bag and a golf pull cart, so I made them. I made a frame out of Aluminum from materials I liberated from our base shop. Judy covered it with blue and black vinyl. I made a pull cart that had wheels and folded up.

We saw several air shows while I was stationed at Cannon. My Mother and Dad came to visit us and we took them to see an air show that featured the Air Force Thunderbird's. We also got to see a fire power demonstration. The Air Force had brought all their Cadets down from the USAF Academy in Colorado Springs to watch the F100 and the Tactical Air Command do it's thing. They sat up bleachers and a PA system for us, high on a ridge over looking a valley were their target range was. There were several different demonstrations but of the two I remember the most, one of them was a thing of beauty and the other wasn't. The one I thought was a thing of beauty was supposed to demonstrate how a tiny F100 Jet fighter(compared to the B52)could drop a atom bomb. The announcer directed our attention to the far left horizon where a F100 was just beginning to come into view. Low and on the deck it streaked in front of us from left to right and began to make a radical vertical turn upward which must have turned some terrible G's. At about five thousand feet it released the payload that was attached to it's belly and turned and headed back where it had came from. The large bomb continued it's spiral upward and by the time it had reached its apex and started down, the F100 was out of sight. The bomb then came straight down crashing to the ground. It all seemed happen as if it was in slow motion. It was really a majestic and beautiful thing to watch if something with that deadly potential can be described in those terms.

The other demonstration was supposed to show how a C130 Cargo Transport plane could unload it's cargo without landing and without the use of parachutes. The C130 came flying toward us. It was far out across the valley. It began to descend to the desert floor and lowered it's loading ramp. The idea was to skim across the surface of the ground and drop a hook that was attached to a cable that was attached to the cargo. The hook was supposed to grab a line on the ground and pull the cargo out of the plane. The plane was then supposed to go back up without ever landing. The C130 flew low across the floor of the valley headed straight at us, we all waited for something to happen but nothing did. As it got closer to us and to the bottom of the ridge that we were on it began to veer left and ascend up to miss the ridge. Just before the plane got to the top of the ridge and about 300 yards off our right the cargo came out of the back end of the plane and came crashing down into the side of the ridge causing debris and dust to splash up with a thunderous roar . The announcer undaunted, started announcing the next demonstration.

The Vietnam war was heating up, and the US Army had extended all the enlistment's of their personnel. I was scared to death the Air Force was going to do the same. I had served my four years and I wanted out. My Squadron Commander and the First Sergeant tried to talk me into re-enlisting which is S.O.P. I told them that the Air Force wasn't a bad life if you didn't mind not being in control of your own life and your own future. That kind of life wasn't for me.

My last day in the Air Force finely arrived. December 17 1965. It was two days short of four hears since I enlisted. On my last day, all I had to do was to go to the base and sign out in about 15 different places. The last one being base HQ. I literally ran from place to place because I was afraid up to the last minute that the Air Force was going to extend my enlistment. For some reason I don't remember, I rode to and from the base with someone that I can't remember. When I got back to the house, Judy and Tim were sitting in the car waiting. I had already hooked the trailer to the car and it was ready to go. I got in and we headed for the green green grass of home.(Its not the end but it's all I'm going to write about).

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