My mother says I was born in the hospital but almost born in the backseat of a taxi cab. On the way to the hospital, the cab came to a railroad crossing and there was a train, an exceedingly long freight train that was passing.

As she tells the story, at one point she asked the cab driver if he had ever delivered a baby and he looked around with stark terror in his face and he says, “No, why?”

She says, “Either this train gets by or you’re gonna learn how!” (Laughter)

So, that was the first exciting event in my life before my life actually started, I guess.

Parents:
My dad’s dad was George Newell, and his dad was George, then there was a John, and then it goes back for about four or five more generations of George Newells. So, they like the name George in the Newell family. Everybody had a different second name so you weren’t George the Third, for Forth or anything like that. Everybody had a different middle name.

My dad as he was growing up was known as Watts. That was his middle name to distinguish him from his father whose name was George. So, he was always known as Watts like the Watts area of Los Angeles. In fact, he told me that we have relatives that used to harvest hay at the corner of Hollywood and Vine in the Watts area. I don’t know how far back that history goes, but…


Family:
My dad passed away in 1986 but he was poultry science professor at Okalahoma State University. He had the nickname Dr. Egg. He did a lot of agricultural extension work. A lot of the land grant colleges, one of which Okalahoma State was, had this extension program where they reached out to the farmers, the industry, and worked with them on a lot of stuff.

I think my dad loved that more than the work at the university. He would go around and visit with farmers and small industry in the chicken business and turkey business all throughout Okalahoma and Kansas, Arkansas and that area.

He had a radio show that he would do on the local radio station. I can remember as a college kid going on a trip and it was real early in the morning and we were driving into the early morning and listening. The announcer comes on the radio, “We’ve got Dr. George Newell from Okalahoma State University!” and all the kids in the car go, “What! That’s your dad!” (Laughs) He enjoyed it a lot.

My mother is Virginia and she’s still living. She lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma where I grew up. The home of Oklahoma State University is. She is 86; just turned 86 on the 5th of February, 2007.

In fact, I am getting ready to go back and visit mom. She lives there, my youngest sister lives there in Stillwater. I have a sister who lives in Ohio with a bunch of her family; she’s my oldest sister, Edith. Then my second oldest sister, Sue, lives in Florida and a bunch of her family lives in Florida, so we’re kinda spread around the United States.

Every two years we have a family reunion. Last year it was in Dayton, Ohio where my sister lives and a year from now – it’s every other year – it will be in California. Everybody will truck out to California and get together and tell stories and eat barbequed chicken, because that was my dad’s favorite. (Laughter) It was great!

We’d have all kinds of benefits of having a poultry science professor in the family. We’d have chicken for Sunday dinner with four drumsticks and green eggs, because it was part of the experiment process out at the university. So, we had all kinds of perks of being a member of the poultry science family at Okalahoma State.