So, I was born in Lafayette and it was during the war in ’45, toward the end of the war and we moved around. We went from there to Brentwood, Maryland and then we ended up in Stillwater. That’s really where I grew up. I lived there from preschool; I guess maybe I was four or five by the time we moved to Stillwater and all the way up until I graduated from college.

Well actually, when we first moved there we lived in college apartments. They had housing for teachers/professors at the university so we lived in what they called the “College Courts.” These were a bunch of one-story fourplexes and a very small little place. My parents had a bedroom. My two older sisters had a bedroom and then my bedroom was the front room, but it was fun.

I had a great time growing up there. It was actually, as a childhood, Stillwater was a great place to grow up because it was safe. It was not a country town and it had the university there so you had kind of the stimulation of things that go on at the school as well as being the county seat. So, it was large enough that there were all kinds of things going on.

Then in the summertime my parents would take us to Yale, Okalahoma which was near Stillwater. My two older sisters and I would get on the train and take the train to Coffeeville, Kansas and then change trains there. It was great. They would take us to the train station in Yale. There the conductor would turn us over to the conductor on the train and he would make sure we got off the train in Coffeeville, Kansas. He would turn us over to the waitress in the coffee shop at the train station. Then she would make sure we got on the train that was going to Rockville, Missouri. Then we’d get off and our grandparents would be waiting for us at the other end.

You know, in this day and age I don’t think that kind of thing would happen, but that’s how they did it. It was great. You would think, gosh, am I gonna put my kids on a train and send them through two states? Sure! It was perfectly safe. We had a great time! We had fun.

The conductor would kind of look out for us to make sure we didn’t get in any trouble or whatever. There was no trouble to be had! This was Okalahoma, Kansas, Missouri. What kind of trouble was there? It was a great day! Then we’d spend a month living with my grandparents and then my parents would drive up and pick us up after that. They’d stay there for a while and then we’d all come back.

I can remember being on the train. I’d be on the train with my sister Sue who was two years older than me and we’d go back by the drinking fountain and we thought that if we could jump up in the air high enough and stay up the train would move out from under us. So we would jump and try so hard to get high enough up in the air that the train could move out from under us. We’d swear we’d move four or five inches! Of course, what we didn’t realize was we were traveling as fast as the train. But as kids we didn’t understand that concept. We thought, God, if you could just jump up in the train and move and then wait you’d land on a different spot on the floor! It was our early physics lesson!

We’d do chores on the farm. It was a great experience. Kids now talk about wanting to understand where their food comes from, but we knew. We knew. We were there when calves were born; we knew when sheep were slaughtered.

My aunt and uncle had a big hog farm and we’d come at the end of the summer. My dad would load up the car with all this organically grown food from our relative’s farm in Missouri and bring it back and we’d live off that for the rest of the year.

We lived in the college courts for a while and then my dad built a house out on the east side of town and it wasn’t rural but it was not downtown Stillwater. We had an acre of land and really my childhood home was this house. I grew up there and went from school from grade school on up until I graduated from high school. I went to college at Okalahoma State. I graduated from there. I did a year of graduate school there and then went into the Navy.