New Beginnings

 I met my Highway Patrol Trooper neighbor a couple of years ago when he arrived at my house to investigate an accident. As it turns out, a guy was driving his car and had a heart attack and died behind the wheel. As his car proceeded down the hill just east of my place it maintains its position on the roadway for a quarter mile or so and then drifts across the centerline to the left, leaves the road, travels a short way down the bar ditch and comes to a stop when it strikes my front pipe fence. A guy driving the opposite direction witnesses the car as it leaves the roadway and sees it hit my fence. He stops in my driveway and and goes to the other vehicle. The engine is still running, the doors on the small car are locked and the driver is non-responsive. He runs to my front door and rings the doorbell multiple times and by the time I get there, no one is at the front door. I step out on the front porch and see him running back to my driveway and yell at him asking what he needs. H...

  I am not necessarily proud that I had to work long hard hours (meaning 60-70 per week as a normal work week) throughout the majority my adult life. What I am proud of is the fact that nobody ever   gave   me anything and everything I achieved, I did it through hard work, perseverance and determination. I worked longer hours than most people I know not because I wanted to, rather it was the price I paid to provide for my family and achieve what I consider success. I figured out many decades ago that in order to be a success I would have to pay the price of money for a college degree, or pay the price time and work my way through the ranks. I am convinced that a large part of my adulthood success was because I simply out worked most of the people that I worked with and was determined to be better than they were in as many ways as I could. I have to say it paid off, though I did end up working for about seven years longer than I had planned and did not retire until the age...

  It is July of 2001 and I have just received my 5th or 6th Jury Duty Summons since I registered to vote for the first time in 1976 when I was 19 years old. Each time I got one of these summons in the mail before, the case had either settled before the jury selection process started or I was not selected for one reason or another so I have never served on a jury. I have always wanted to do this, at least once just to see how this process worked in real life versus how it is portrayed on television or in the movies and I expected this one to be no different. This case was filed in District Court and was about a property owner who had agreed to be paid by a power utility provider to set one of those very tall metal transmission towers on his property complete with easement access. He agreed to this arrangement for $75,000. Shortly after construction started, he decided he was entitled to a larger sum of money, which they refused to pay so he was now taking them to court to get the $3...

The year would have been about 1973 and the month would have been about June of that year. Steve, Rusty and me were using Steve's old 1959 Chevrolet pickup truck to haul hay that summer. We had several jobs lined up and we wanted to finish up a small hay patch just north of the Callisburg high school so we could move on to other more lucrative opportunities over around Gordonville near Lake Texoma.  This hay belonged to a guy named Jim Titch and this little pasture only made about 150-200  bales or so. It would not take too long because the barn we were stacking it in was pretty close by. Our plan was to get up very early that morning, knock it out and move on. We agreed that Rusty would drive to the hay field and Steve would pick me up and we would meet up at 5:00 that morning. What we didn't know was there was no moon that night and it was absolutely pitch dark at that time.  If you have ever hauled hay, you know it is much cooler to haul at nighttime, but there is alwa...

 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...