I graduated from high school in 1955, and I felt that was reaping the promise of America’s industrial strength.

My father survived going to the war because he was working for Standard Oil as a welder. He had three children, and they wouldn’t take him. They forced him to stay. He was a workaholic and took on two jobs. When he wasn’t welding from three to 11:00 PM, he was ranching. He grew cattle to raise extra money and buy more property, and more property and more property.

Consequently we never stopped working. We worked, worked, worked, and worked!

By the time I was nine years old I was milking cows twice a day: once at 5:30 AM, and once at 5:30 PM. Instead of having time to play ball or go swimming, we worked. My father never had time to throw a ball to me in his life. We never went on vacations. There was always that has to milk and work to be done. We had thousands of animals and they all had to be fed.
We had so much food and so many blessings. We didn’t have a lot of money but we were rich in many blessings.

My career had nothing to do with my upbringing other than I was allowed to have imagination and be creative. I come from a creative family on my mother’s side. Everyone in my family seems to be artistic in some way. My brother was certainly artistic before me. Scholastically, he was smarter than I. But I seem to have a well – rounded attitude about everything.


I Hitch-Hike to California, Determined to be a Movie Star

So, I went on to leave home and enroll at Louisiana state university for three semesters. The summer I turned eighteen I hitch – hiked to California determined to be either in the movies or a designer.

I was disappointed in Los Angeles. I felt it wasn’t the dream that I had dreamed about and seen in the movies. It was an illusion, so I took the reality of what I saw and fled! As I fled, I went through San Francisco and fell in love with it immediately.

In San Francisco, I decided to enroll in a private school called Rudolph Schaefer to be a designer. It was a good thing for me because I could work my way through school. My father gave me some financial help and I went on to graduate.

It was unique school where the students were taught by all professional working people. Frank Lloyd Wright would come and give us lectures. Famous designers were our teachers. We had fabric designers teaches how to design and dye material.

The only let in fifteen students per year, and each student received a lot of attention. But in my class, only two of us became designers. One student became the model – maker for the architectural firm of Skidmore Owens and Merrill. Another student created the jewelry department of Gump’s, and he is still there running the show.

I gave up on the idea of the movies the moment I made up my mind to go to design school.

First of all, I’m gay. And being gay you have the opportunity to take that so many talents. You could be a flower arranger, a chef, a hairdresser, a dress designer, a car designer or a truck driver. But with all these possibilities I made up my mind what I was going to do with my life and a stop to it. Com hell or high – water, I never altered my role.

I look at the movies with regret because I always wanted to be a movie star, but I think that seems to be the bad joke of life for many of us. I think I could have really become a movie star, but it’s just a pipe dream.

At Louisiana state university I sang in front of 3500 people. I was really good, and I love to dance. I never had a problem as a performer. I represented my school in all kinds of ways. I won a state office in a young people’s election. I was in 4-H. I just seem to excel in public abilities.

My abilities got me a trip to the United Nations in New York. The odd fellows and the Legion of Honor put together a trip of young people from every state in the union. We were to meet in the United Nations building for a review. I was one of the children from Louisiana who was chosen. We went on greyhound buses, picking up the other children as we traveled towards New York.

We stayed at the Waldorf Astoria hotel and we were greeted by Eleanor Roosevelt. We too are to Washington. It was a sensational trip to have one at age seventeen. Before this I had never been out of Louisiana. My parents didn’t have a lot of money. My father didn’t want to lose the work that we were doing.

This was a wonderful opportunity that open my eyes and gave me even more spectacular expectations about what I could do or be. At the same time I was poorly educated scholastically. My parents weren’t into education; they were into survival.

No one spoke well around me; I fear that my language was poor. So I enrolled at Galileo night school in studied English again. This was after I finished design school. I RE find my English to improve my life because I was lacking. I spoke with a very strong southern accent. I wanted to be able to form a better sentence and write better.