New Beginnings

 My Granny and Pawpaw Strickland lived much closer than my other grandparents did, so I saw them much more often than I saw my mom's parents. They lived in the Denton Texas area their entire life and since we lived either about 30 minutes south of Denton or about 45 minutes north of Denton most of my childhood so we had the opportunity to visit with them more frequently. The picture below was taken in July 1960 when Pawpaw  who was then 52 years old in the picture below and Granny was 50 years old. Granny had only one job for as long as I can remember which was at the Denton State School (which is a facility managed my the state of Texas that provides care for the intellectually disabled that housed about 1700 residents when it opened in 1960) where she worked in the the laundry department. Pawpaw had two jobs as I remember, one was at Acme Brick in Denton and the other was as a janitor at college known at that time as North Texas State University.  The photo below was ta...

  The main objective for creating this blog in the first place was to document stories of my life that my children may have forgotten or maybe never knew and for their children and their children's children. I never knew my great-grandparents and have only met met one of them, my great grandmother who died when I was 13 years old and I knew little to nothing about her. I did not want this to be the case for my downline. Among the travels and adventures I have shared here in the previous 48 stories of this blog, I have not included very many stories of my childhood yet, however I did dedicate a couple of posts about when we moved to the country when I was a kid and when I met Carol Ann in high school. For some time I thought it would be fun for me and entertaining for them to see a pictorial account of me and Carol Ann as we grew up. So for that purpose, I have found as many school pictures that I can find and have matched them up to show what each of us looked like as the years pas...

 The cover photo for this story was taken just outside the Capitol building which was one of the many sites we visited while on our summer trip to Washington D.C. After I took my business trip here in 2008 as documented in Episode 39, I was certain Carol Ann would enjoy this vacation, there is so much to see and so much history, I felt like it would be a great place for us to visit. It was four years later in August 2012 when we  had the opportunity to take this trip. We flew into the small airport in Roanoke Virginia which was about the size of Love Field in Dallas. From there we picked up the rental car and made the scenic drive  to Monticello which is the Thomas Jefferson home place. As a side note, I did not know until this trip that Jefferson (a deist by faith) re-wrote the Gospels of the Bible removing all of the references of the Deity of Christ. It was a pretty drive though the closer we got to Alexandria the traffic really did build up a lot. As you can imagine, ...