My father drove a tractor trailer. He would come home every two or three days. When he was a half hour from home he would call my mother and she would start cooking dinner; sometime it was 1, 2or 3 o'clock in the morning. When he came home we would all be sitting at the table waiting for him. We all ate together.

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Growing up we had two pets. A dog named Banjo and a rabbit named Fletcher. We had them living in two separate dog houses. My mother didn't want the dog in the house (shedding). She said if God wanted a dog to live in a house, he wouldn't put fur on it.

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I believe going to school in the 50s and 60s, you had to get a grade of 65 or better to move on to the next grade. If you didn't, you repeated the grade. There were two people in my senior class that were 21 years old.  I have asked kids if they had to repeat the grade, would they have tried harder; they said of course.

I grew up in a small two-bedroom home. I had four sisters, one bathroom. My parents slept in one room, my sisters in the other. I slept in the attic but had plenty of blankets. Before school each of us had twenty minutes in the bath room.

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I remember when I was a teenager. I got two pairs of shoes-one in September and one in the spring for Easter. Sometimes you would wear a hole in the bottom of your shoe before you got the next pair so you would put apiece of cardboard or a piece of roofing shingle (that was the best) to plug the hole so your socks would not get wet when it rained. Many nights we ate leftovers from our previous nights and always plenty of bread to fill you up. Nothing was ever thrown out. We had a garden and fruit trees to help us with the food. I got my first bike that I made from parts I got in the dump. It wasn't pretty but you could ride it.