Comments:
“What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
OK, you guys whined about us writing some stories. So, Here Wego.
Wait a minute, I only get 8000 words?
Seems like I am listening to the Stones, Zeppelin, and Jimi more lately.
“Purple haze all through my brain
Lately things don’t seem the same.
Acting funny, but I don’t know why
Cuse me while I kiss the sky”
I can recall feeling like that while crawling out of Forkyville night after night.
I enlisted in the Air force in April 1966. My first permanent duty station was in north Texas near Lake Texoma which had lots of beaches. During the summer of 1967 I met the beauty of the beach. Her name was Linda Miller and she just melted me with her soft Texas draw. We married in June 1968. Literally one month later I got orders to go to Viet Nam. I was a jet mech on jet fighters and my orders were to stop at Okinawa and cross train on C130s. Two squadrons worked out of the same hanger. They had 30 of the old fighters I was proficient on and no shop chief. So they changed my orders to stay there and run the shop. This meant that Linda could join me there. Now, she had never been out of Texas or Oklahoma in her life and had never been on a plane. She was only twenty years old and flew by herself from Dallas to Seattle, to Anchorage to Tokyo, then down to Okinawa, 10,000 miles and half way around the world by herself! Talk about courage!
We lived about a mile off base near the port. During November of 1969 the Air Force came and got me in the middle of the night. All they could tell Linda was that I was going to Korea on a C130 and they were not sure when I would return. We had about a dozen birds there as a show of force during the Pueblo crisis. The North Koreans had captured our navy ship some months earlier. I was up there on a South Korean base for about three weeks. There were no cell phones in those days. So now she was half way around the world by herself not knowing when I would return. Talk about courage!
I was discharged on April Fool’s day 1970, seems fitting doesn’t it. I returned to SIUE on the GI Bill and graduated with honors summer of 1972. Linda worked as a teller in Godfrey State Bank. We built a home on six acres of woods our where I still live today.
We had our first son the normal American way on Sept 8, 1973. While in her ninth month with our second child in December 1975, Linda announced that she was going to have this one natural. No drugs. She did the next day and it almost killed her. Doctors said “No more kids”. Talk about courage! She later worked as an Office Manager for a large Apple Dealer in West Port.
I worked as a Product Manager and Territory Sales Rep in the computer industry based in West Port till 1998. I had lived through two mergers and could see a third coming. No one should live though three mergers in a life time, so I bailed out at age fifty four.
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
I joined the Make A Wish Foundation as a Wish Granter. Been doing it for fourteen years and have granted over 200 Wishes. It is still special to be able to ask the magic question, “Do you have a wish?”
Later, I joined a team from my church’s conference and Habitat For Humanity to go to Ecuador for two weeks to build houses. Katrina hit and I went to Biloxi instead. The storm surge was chest high in the house I worked on even though it was half mile from the beach. This lead to working with the St. Louis chapter on the Saturday builds. On the first day of the 2010 build season I didn’t make it past lunch. My body reminded me that I was no longer young.
I still work a three day week driving a delivery truck for O’Reilly Auto Parts.
I have served two terms on the board of our Church here in Godfrey and am now on the board of our school.
Linda passed away on May 27, 2008 at age fifty nine. She was a beautiful woman of great courage.
“Two roads diverged in a wood”
