Scholastically, I was a terrible student. I had a B average in high school and never cracked a book. I remember freshman year of high school, I had to take a geometry class and I started flunking the class, and my parents went and talked to the teacher and the teacher said I was stupid. My parents got a copy of the book, tutored me at home, and I got an A at the end of the year.

If you put your mind to it, you can do anything. I remember once we made canoes and went down the Sacramento River. Another summer, we made canoes for the console. I spent one summer as a trail guide for Boy Scout camp for the San Mateo console at Twin Lakes. One troop wanted to do a fifty-miler, so we hiked the whole perimeter and then we were putting some milk in the stream before we left, then we came back and found it had gone sour.

Another time, there was a lake, which is called Immigrant Lake, which is five miles out of Caples Lake. We sent a troop in there and there were some injuries, so we had to bring them out on a stretcher in the middle of the night.

About seventh grade, I wanted a new bicycle. There was one for sale for about seventy-five dollars. My parents bought it and it stayed in its crate until I paid for every penny of it. I think that is kind of a throwback to living in the depression.

To this day, if I can’t pay cash for something, I won’t buy it. With the obvious exception of a house. As I got older, and had to buy cars, I joined a credit union. I put my money in there, and instead of paying the bank, I would just pay myself. I paid cash for my automobiles. We have credit cards, but they are all paid off. And that is just something that we do. It was instilled in me at a young age.

And there was a sign in the fifties that said “Put a dollar down a week and buy everything that you see,” and I remember my parents laughing at that and saying it was terrible because what was it teaching people of our country? They would just get bad credit.

When I was at Oregon State, I was living in the dorm. Each dorm had a separate living room. We had a party, I don’t know why. One of the kids in the dorm with us was putting on a magic show. And he was swallowing gasoline and spitting out gasoline with a candle and making fire. What he didn’t realize was that he had spilled it all down his foot and he quickly became a huge torch. I pulled the draperies off of the windows, rolled the kid up in the draperies, picked him up, put him in the car, and drove him to the hospital. I remember dragging him down the hallway. The kid was in the hospital for months. He had gangrene in his leg.

Children

We never told our kids that they had to get good grades. We told them that they could do anything they wanted, but we expected them to do their best. I remember telling them to go to their rooms, but I can’t remember why. I remember once we had Susan stay in her room for a while and when she came out, she said “I will be good for the rest of my life.” That didn’t happen.