I love to cook. I came from a cooking family. When I was born we had a big wood burning iron stove. My grandmother and mother cooked constantly, so you could observe cooking all the time.

As a little boy I was a fire bug. I was always building fires and preparing to cook. As soon as they went out the door I would start cooking.

Or, I would build fires and set these on fire. I just loved fire!

I used to go to stores, collect cardboard boxes, drag them home and great effort and build a skyscraper, and then set it on fire!

My father had an enormous stack of rubber tires. It was a pyramid as high as the house. He was going to use those tires as the sides of a cattle-roping pen. But I set those tires on fire!

It was a major fire. In our town they didn’t have a fire truck so people came and lined up in a bucket brigade. The fire was near our barn so our barn could have burned down. I didn’t get a whipping because I was so ashamed by the reaction of our neighbors who thought I was a bad boy. I was disgraced!

Around our house we had acreage, we had jungles to explore, vines to swing on, rivers to try to drown ourselves in… it was constant exploration!

I’m other played the piano buying year; she never had a lesson. My grandmother bought her a piano for $100.00, and my mother could play quite well. She taught me the chords. Then, I took about three months of lessons from Mrs. Allen who wanted me to play Mozart. But I wanted to play “somewhere over the rainbow.” She told me that music would never last, so I stopped taking lessons. I went on to play very well.

TV was invented around this time. Baton Rouge was only eighteen miles away, and I could go there to saying and play piano and entertain on TV.

I was a self – taught business person. I went into business for myself as a designer and I learned the hard way about how to be in business. I came from a family that always paid its bills. I didn’t believe in borrowing money. You could only by which you could afford. I practiced that theory throughout my life, right up to this moment.