I was born on November 17, 1951 in Kankakee, Illinois. To be considered an antique an object has to be over 50 years old, so I guess that makes me an antique. In 1951 the Korean War was coming to an uneasy truce. Princess Elizabeth was preparing to ascend to the British Throne. Her son, Prince Charles, was only three years old. Bread was selling for $ .20 a loaf and eggs were going for $ .59 a dozen. The Hydrogen bomb was being developed and tested. The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn and A Street Car Named Desire starring Marlin Brando and Vivien Leigh were popular movies that year. All About Eve won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Joe DiMaggio signed a $100,000 contract with the Yankees as they beat the New York Giants in the 6th game of the World Series. Truman was President of the United States and Winston Churchill was appointed Prime minister of England by King George VI.
In my fifty plus years on this planet, I have witnessed the rise of television, electric typewriters, transistor radios and the first man rocketed into outer space and land on the surface of the Moon. I have gone from crank telephones and party lines to cell phones and 4G iPhones that access the internet and take movies and pictures. I cannot believe I survived college with a typewriter and library books and hand written term papers. We could only use a slide rule on tests. The new Texas Instruments calculators were not allowed. Computers, the Internet, word processing programs and Photo Shop changed everything. The black and white film used in my old Kodak Brownie camera had to be hand wound onto a roll and turned into the local drug store to be developed into prints which sometimes took up to a week. Today, digital cameras take high resolution, color photos that can be down loaded on my home computer, tweaked with a photo program and e-mailed to friends and family in minutes.
I have been married three times. I have two amazing daughters, each now married and having their own children. Yes, I am a grandfather and I have a grandson on the way. My parents and grandparents are now dead and boy, do I feel old. My first job was working on my family’s chicken farm. My best paying job was as a Senior Buyer for Motorola, Inc. My most rewarding job is my current job working for the Education Department as a historical interpreter for the Alamo here in San Antonio, Texas.
My need to be creative led me to write several books of poetry. I performed my work at poetry readings in Chicago area coffeehouses during my time there. I joined a wonderful group of talented writers during those years and published a variety of magazine articles as a freelance writer. Upon my arrival in San Antonio, I was given the opportunity to write a book about the most famous historic shrine in Texas, The Alamo. It has been a best seller and is now heading into its second printing. My other creative urge has been to create art. I love to paint with oil and acrylic on canvas. It really helps to be married to one of San Antonio’s most talented fiber artists, Lisa Kerpoe. She has encouraged me to get my work out there and displayed in a gallery, most recently, the SAVA Gallery. Our life together down here has been a wonderful creative soup and I thank her very much.
My 58 years have been full of change. I have survived many ups and downs. I have lost people very dear to me, just as I have welcomed new members to my family who will carry on after I am no more. I have loved and been loved and truly blessed by this incredible journey called Life. I have known great joy, but I have been terribly disappointed by man’s inability to “see the forest for the trees.” My spiritual beliefs have taken me from an agnostic to a New Age view of things. I believe that we create our own reality and that we are all One with our Creator in an existence without end. Each of us, even to the lowest of us, is a valuable, precious piece of the whole of what Is. This is the Truth I have come to in my time on this earth. I am not perfect, but I am on a path of eternal growth and learning. The more I learn the more I realize how little I know.
Food for THOUGHT…
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