Living in Altus,
OK in 1969.I attended ninth grade at The Loomis School in Windsor, Connecticut. I was not prepared for a private boarding school and really didn't want to go. I did poorly and repeated ninth grade at Manchester High School, graduating in 1966. The fall after I turned 16, I started working and earned a considerable amount of money working part-time for the early and mid-sixties. I worked for a sporting goods store on Main Street in Manchester, Connecticut. Work was meaningful because it was something that I did well, I was treated with respect, I was paid (about $1.10 an hour), and I got out of school a period early to go to work!
I didn't do well in school, but I was a voracious reader. I read EVERYTHING in sight. When I was a sophomore, I read J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye for a book report. I was not allowed to give the book report to the class, but had to give it after school. I really had no idea when I read it that it was such a "bad" book or had been censored. I could see so much of myself in Holden Caufield. I had just left a private school and was trying to adjust to a new school as well as find my own identity as a teenager.
As a senior, I wrote my first true research paper. I went to the Hartford Public Library and used microfiche to read the original articles on submarines in World War One. It was an exciting and creative project to me. I hung around with a group of fellows who called themselves the Highland Park Trollers - it was hardly a gang like today, but just a group of kids who liked to have fun and party. The girls were called the Trollettes. I bought my first motorcycle as a senior. It was a little Suzuki 80. I chopped the rear fender, tucked and rolled the seat, and put high bars on it - my own mini-chopper...
Two roads diverged in
a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
Living in Altus,
OK in 1969.
Get your motor
running
Head out on the highway
Lookin' for adventure
In whatever comes our way.
Steppenwolf
Family values, as a matter of fact, all values changed radically in the Sixties. The Sixties brought about many changes in all of us. Great leaders were assassinated. Imperialism, racism, sexism, war, drugs, sex, and political activism were the topics of the day. Generations were pitted against one another. Atrocities were committed on the battlefield and campus. I was active in the anti-war movement in Ohio resistance while I served in the Air Force. (I know that this is a contradiction, but I didn't want to go to college and would not carry a gun. The Air Force was my best choice at that point in time.) After I got out of the Air Force, I went to college and went on the road in the spirit of Jack Kerouac, and Captain America and Billy in Easy Rider. I was never a hippie. I never had long hair, though it was longer and more plentiful than now, and I never wore bell bottom pants.
There's battle lines
being drawn
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind
Buffalo Springfield
Remember the TV show Then Came Bronson? The watch cap and the pose are taken directly from that show imagery of a Jack London sailor - a story about a reporter who traveled the country on his HD Sportster. It was like "Route 66" on two wheels. The theme song started, "Going down that long, lonesome highway...".
After riding my Ducati across the country, I ended up in a small town where I had been stationed and had started my college program. Altus Junior College was a wonderfully supportive environment. I doubt that I would have ever continued with college had I not attended AJC.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointedThe next trip brought me north to Alaska, I returned to college and worked to save money for the next big adventure. It seemed there was only one big thing left to do - go around the world. I met Dorothy who was teaching high school at the time. She was planning on going around the world too. I talked her into going my way - west to east. About a month later, I left - hitching to Vancouver, BC where she met me a month later.
Dori, me, and our boats on Lake Labarge.
What is it that
confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above
that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking
where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before;
that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea--to discover a great
thought.
Mark Twain
We traveled to Alaska, took two rubber life rafts down the Yukon River for a couple of hundred miles, on to Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, India, West Pakistan, Afghanistan (where I became deathly ill), Iran, and through Turkey to Istanbul where we flew home because I was so ill.