I was raised on an apple ranch. My father ran an apple-drying business. He grew up on them on the ranch, and it was beautiful!

Bob lived in town, so I didn’t know him.

We had a tiny little home and there were four kids and my mother, my father, and my grandmother. And then in 1959, my father built a large home on the ranch. We moved into that when I was thirteen years old.

Life was fabulous; very bucolic. We didn’t know what we lacked. My sister Mary and I were responsible for cleaning up the windfall apples on my grandmother’s eight-acre ranch. We did that every summer until I turned twelve.

At that point I started to work in my father’s apple dryer as an office assistant. Growing up on the apple ranch was beautiful And I loved it. Our nearest neighbor was a half-mile away. She and I were the same age so we spent a lot of time together.

Her parents were less strict than my parents so I used to visit her every day. We had much more fun at her house. The roof of the barn was off – limits, but we would climb up there anyway. Climbing on the roof was as bad as we got. I was a very good kid, but she wasn’t.