I’m most proud of having a happy marriage, five kids. My oldest son just retired as a full colonel in the Air Force. All my kids have been very successful except one who had a lot of problems, but they’re all good kids. The problems are economic ones rather than anything else.

If we were plagued with the things that kids have now such as drugs and addictions it might have been different. But we didn’t have that; we were very fortunate.

We were living in Saratoga, California when the letters came home from the school. The letter started out: “you are all familiar with the drug problem that we have in Saratoga…”

This would have been about 1974 or 1976. I asked my kids what it was all about and they said that there were things like that going on. I ask them to tell me more and they said: “there’s nothing more to say, dad!”

All my kids have gone to college and four of the five of them have two degrees.

Being a parent is an accomplishment. You don’t think about it at the time, you think about it later.

When my first wife died all my kids came to me one at a time and said they sat with me and said the same thing: “thank you for loving our mother, thank you for being a good father.”