Everything can change with a phone call.

  I love my dad.  He’s an amazingly gentle, smart, kind and quiet 87 year old.  He lived through the depression, left Minnesota as a kid and came to Oregon where he picked strawberries with his dad and later worked in the CCC’s fighting fires.  After Pearl Harbor he volunteered for the Army and served under [...]

Golfing in Rome

It cost a quarter to golf in Rome.  That was for the ball.  The sheep and cows kept the fairways ’groomed’,  and the putting greens were not quite up to snuf.  But if you were a 19 year old Staff Sargent from Oregon, it was a pretty good way to spend a little time away from the [...]

Knoxville Knews

My father-in-law was the first Captain of the USS Knoxville, PF-64, during WW2. This Patrol Frigate first served in the Atlantic, running out of Norfolk as a training vessel. The Knoxvillle was then deployed as a transport and escort ship from the east coast to Africa, occassionally engaging in an anti-submarine vessel, and returned to Norfolk [...]

June 22, 1947

On June 22, 1947 Lowell and Juanita walked down the aisle of the Wee Kirk of the Heather, Forest Lawn, Glendale, California.  A few minutes down the road, in Pasadena, California, Octavia Butler was coming into the world. June 22, 2007, my family shares a simple white cake with raspberry fillling at the Montrose [...]