My neighborhood was typical residence suburbia. We had track houses and vacant lots across the street from us. For entertainment once we made sleds with runners of two-by-fours. Each runner was about six inches thick. The grass would get high and when it dried it would get very slippery.

I also made a wagon, and being a lazy person, I didn’t want to push it, so I made a sail for it. My father had always sailed. When he and my mother got married, he had a boat and he had to feed the whole family. We would go up to Seattle to relatives in the summertime and we would go to a place we called ‘camp’ which is near Kingston.

My grandfather was a professor at the University of Washington. He and several other professors bought forty acres of land in the early 1900’s and they built summer houses out there. Each family that had a small cabin would have a ‘commissary’ and hire a cook for the summertime.

In the fifties and forties people started dying off. My grandfather died in 1928. And he died in Europe after winning a Pulitzer Prize for American literature. To this day, I am still getting royalties from his work. His name was Vernon Louis Parrington, and his book was Main Currents in American Thought. It is three volumes. That is who I am named after.

But, we would go out there. And at that time my aunt and her husband had rented a cabin down around there and practically every summer we would go out and spend time around there and go out on the flats about a half a mile or so. And we could see a picture of the Olympic Peninsula, snowcapped mountains. We would see Mount Rainier to our right and Mount Baker to the left.

My uncle had a sailboat, so we would go out sailing periodically. I have memories of taking his sailboat out and fishing for whatever we could find. Sometimes if we were lucky, get a salmon. We would also go dig for clams. They were the little butter clams about two or three inches across. To this day there are still crabs and clams on it.

After my parents died, my mother had an interest in it, and the forty acres on the waterfront of Puget Sound. I have thirteenth interest in it. But it’s in an organization, and I am a member. And each member, in theory can build a cabin on it, but because of building restrictions of the local government, I can’t build yet. I go up there every summer now. In addition to that, we would take some pack trips up in the high Sierra and go in on horseback and mules and spend two weeks hiking around the high country in the high Sierra. I got a love for the outdoors there.

As I got into high school, I played water polo in the fall and did swim team in the spring. So, I jumped in the pool in September and got out in June. So, I have always been active in water sports. Every year, we would go skiing a couple of times. I learned to ski when I was about four or five years old. I have memories of skiing Mount Waterman in Southern California when I was five.

I remember going up to Dodge Ridge and yelling at the top of my months that my parents were too cheap to pay for a lift ticket, because we climbed the hill before we could go down the hill. That was going back to the times of the early twenties when they would put seal skins on and climb all day long. They taught me how to ski and told me that if you can’t climb the hill, you can’t go down the hill. So, I had to learn to sidestep then and get up the hill however I could.

In those days you could get an all-day ticket for $5 at Dodge Ridge now it is $45 or $50. I was also active in cub scouts from age nine until about five years ago, except the military years. I was almost every position you could be in boy scouts but I was lazy because I never made Eagle. The reason was because I wasn’t interested in some of the merit badges I needed to make it. I got all of the easy ones. The first one I got was for swimming, the second was for lifesaving. I got camping and cooking and on from there. But they had certain required ones and if I wasn’t interested, I wouldn’t do it.