Month: April 2021

26 April 2021

Four trips to Yellowstone with a fifth anticipated in January 2022. At one time I didn’t think I would ever visit this national park and now it is the one that I have visited more times than any other except for the Great Smoky Mountains (which have always been within a day’s drive of most places I’ve lived). This is the story of my very first visit to Yellowstone.

In 1977, I graduated Ole Miss with a Masters of Science in Biology (Ole Miss didn’t offer a degree in botany although that was my concentration). I immediately started applying for jobs and took a summer job with the Youth Conservation Corps in Tishomingo State Park. However, that job was over in August. Fortunately, by that time, I got a response to a job posting from the Bureau of Land Management in Miles City, Montana. In previous posts I’ve alluded to my job with the Bureau. I was now sucking on the teat of the American taxpayer.

I had just moved into a rental house in Miles City when my friend Sara Hurdle from grad school asked if I was up for a trip to Yellowstone National Park. She had never been and since I was relatively close (about a five hour drive) she wanted to come visit me and tour Yellowstone. I really liked Sara and I liked the idea of seeing the park.

I’ve written how she was an older grad student at Ole Miss (her interest was entomology) her friendship with Andy Griffith, her public health career and how I would go on field trips with her. She was still in graduate school but over the years after her graduation, she became a very competent amateur entomologist, often sending specimens back to her mentor at Ole Miss, Paul Lago.

I told her to come on out. She flew into Miles City (God help her – the terminal was a trailer). I had just gotten over three days of food poisoning and was weak as a kitten but off we went to Yellowstone. It had to be December and there was about 12 inches of snow on the ground in Miles City. I had never driven any distance in snow but it was surprisingly easy when the snow was packed down on the highways.

I do remember rounding a corner on the way and and slamming on the breaks when the entire road blocked by a herd of sheep. We had to wait until the sheep herder moved them across the road before proceeding – only in Montana! We also stopped and helped pull someone out of a ditch. I had a truck with four wheel drive and a cable. It was a little touch and go but I managed to get them out of the ditch. You couldn’t not stop. They could have been on that stretch of road for days. This was the wilds of Montana where there was very little traffic.

On the way to our destination, we drove through Little Big Horn National Monument. This was my second visit to that place. My first visit had been earlier in the year and there’s something eerie about that place, even in the daylight.

Somehow we made it to Jackson, Wyoming. Just a note, it’s not Jackson Hole. Jackson Hole is the entire valley. The town in the valley of Jackson Hole is Jackson, Wyoming. We stayed at some motel there and we even had drinks at the Silver Dollar Bar.

She insisted we take downhill ski lessons at Jackson Hole. She also insisted on paying for everything. It was my first time on skis and after about an hour of instruction we were both exhausted – remember, I was still recovering from food poisoning. Sara never managed to right herself after “falling,” one of the first things they teach you. I managed to get up and back upright and even made it to the kiddie slope by T-bar and then ski back down without falling. It was a major victory on my part.

From Jackson, we took a bombardier into Yellowstone. The concept of tourists in Yellowstone in winter had not really taken off in 1977. Today, you have to make long range reservations to go into the park in winter. We had no reservations for hotels or for the bombardier but there was plenty of space and room for us in 1977.

We made it to the Upper Geyser Basin where you find Old Faithful. The Old Faithful Inn was closed for the winter and the only winter accommodations were a hostel near the Inn. It was pretty primitive. I had a single bed in the room that had two beds and there were community baths for men and women. There was a large community room with a microwave and a small stove and refrigerator (no one needed the frig – the snow bank outside worked well). Sara didn’t seem to mind it at all. She was a trooper. Anyone who would tromp around in the woods with me when I was on field trips at Ole Miss was not going to let poor accommodations stop her.

Today if you go to Yellowstone in winter, the Old Faithful Inn is still closed but there’s a modern Snow Lodge with all the amenities.

Sara wanted to try everything. There was no holding her back. I was a little reticent but she pushed me to do things I would not normally do. It was at Yellowstone I put on my first pair of snowshoes.

This loss levitra fast delivery of erection problem has been experienced by a range of men suffering through male sexual disability throughout the world. How should i know if i should take digestive enzyme supplements? One of the best ways to Raise Kids Hands-On- That’s The Ticket. ordering viagra http://deeprootsmag.org/2014/09/03/our-man-flint-1965/ Along with all the concerned remedial behaviors this drug also helps to viagra sildenafil buy redevelop the confidence level in bedroom activities and pleasure. price levitra Not bad for a over-the-counter hair shampoo.

It was also the first time I’ve ever tried cross country skiing. It’s a lot harder than it looks. You really have to wax the skis. That was the first part of the lesson – how to wax them. Sara tried them but decided skiing was not her forte. I later decided cross country skiing was also not my forte. If you are keeping score, that’s three firsts: downhill skiing, snowshoeing, cross country skiing.

There was no restaurant at the hostel during our overnight in Yellowstone. If you wanted something to eat, you had to bring it in yourself. I forget what we ate that morning for breakfast but it was probably left over donuts from Jackson. Maybe the company running the bombardiers provided boxed lunches and breakfasts?

It was also the first time I saw Old Faithful erupt.

I’ve seen it erupt many times since then but the first time is always the best. To be honest, it’s not very impressive in winter. The white column of water and the white steam gets lost in the snowy background. In 1977, you could get a lot closer to the geyser than my future trips to the park.

The bombardier eventually returned us to Jackson and we then toured the National Elk Herd.

I’ve done the Elk herd tour twice. It was cold as all get out both times. It must be the wind sweeping down into the valley of Jackson Hole and if you do this, you better bundle up. We made it during feeding time and they were pushing bales of hay out for the herd while we were there.

Sara was such a unique person. She had a handful with rearing three sons but she must have done a great job since they were extremely deferential to her anytime I was around them with her. One ended up as a statewide elected official in Mississippi, another bought and ran several local Mississippi newspapers. I don’t know what happened to the third son but I suspect he became a lawyer like his older brother and his father.

Sara had a job teaching at Natchez Academy for a while and she made her students do insect collections – like I had to in high school. And just like in my high school, the most difficult specimen for her students to collect was a hog louse. You had to know someone who raised hogs – poorly.

She later moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast and taught there a few years before retiring. After she passed, one of her sons sent me a couple of photographs she had taken of me over the years (see me netting insects for one).

I didn’t expend a penny for the entire trip. Sara paid for everything. I would have normally felt like a “kept” man but that was just the generosity of Sara. As another example, she gave me her entire insect collection one year for me to use at Broward College. I donated the collection to the college and it’s still in use there today.

All I did was show a little kindness to an atypical graduate student by taking her on field trips with me. We somehow clicked and remained friends for the rest of her life. It’s the little things in life that bring the greatest rewards.

For a video of snapshots of 1977 Yellowstone, click here.

Stay tuned and stay safe.

21 April 2021

U.S. Highway 80 once ran from Savannah, Georgia (technically from Tybee Island, Georgia) to San Diego, California. It was part of the old Dixie Overland Highway auto trail and was considered by some to be the first coast to coast highway across the United States although that honor probably belongs to the Lincoln Highway. The zero in the number is significant because only coast to coast highways have a zero as their last digit (think I-10, I-20). Probably no other two lane ribbon of concrete has played a more pivotal role in my life.

I was born in Meridian, Mississippi at St. Joseph’s Hospital. Meridian, at one time, the second largest city in the state, sits along the highway. Most of my childhood years were spent around Morton, Brandon, and Jackson, Mississippi, all along the highway. I was Temporary Assigned Duty (TAD) while in the Coast Guard to Savannah. Boy Scout Camp was at Clinton, Mississippi – Highway 80. Vicksburg with its national battlefield is on Highway 80. The way back to my ship in Corpus Christi went through Monroe, Louisiana – Highway 80.

My earliest memory of the road was sleeping in the front room of my Grandmother’s house in Morton whose front yard led to – the Highway. At night, you would watch the lights of cars and semis march across the ceiling as they traveled either east or west. Back then, the road was built in distinct sections. A section is long as the two lane is wide (24’x24′) and formed from poured concrete. Each section laid down is joined by an expansion joint. Traffic traveling the highway running over those expansion joints would put me to sleep at night. The rhythm of the front and rear wheels hitting those joints was hypnotic (click, click). Today, modern interstate highways are laid down in a continuous concrete pour and their are no expansion joints. No sleep near modern highways.

My cousin Jimmie and I loved playing along the highway. You had to cross the highway to get to our Great Grandparents’ house, to Aunt Delia’s and Uncle George’s, to Aunt Alice’s and Uncle Owen’s. Uncle James’ Shell station sat at the junction MS 481 and Highway 80. Across from the station was a fruit stand and after the station closed, Jimmie and I ate our weight in potato chips and cokes pretty much every day so we crossed that ribbon a couple of times a day.

The road was also the scene of our “arrest” by the town constable, Lauris Sessums. We couldn’t have been much older than 7 or 8 but we got in a habit of standing along the highway and trying to get semis to sound their air horn as they roared past. You would make the motion of the driver pulling the cord for his air horn and if you were lucky, the driver would give you a couple of blasts from his horn.

We graduated from that to deciding it would be great fun to have the trucks run over something and squash it flat. I came by that idea honestly. When Dad was stationed in Havre de Grace, Maryland at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, we always took the train. Archie and I would put a penny on the tracks at the station in hopes of getting the train to flatten the penny (don’t try this at home, kids).

Jimmie and I quickly tired of flattening cans and boxes so one of us (I’ll blame Jimmie) came up with the idea of making a ramp for the tires of the semi to roll up. Actually, the ramp was a brick with a board propped on it. We had no idea what that might do to a tire. The trucks would barrel through that part of town and only have to begin slowing at the light in downtown Morton. Fortunately, only one truck made it up our ramp and fortunately our ramp didn’t cause any damage. So what to do next for two bored kids in the summer evening?

How about lie down in one of the lanes and play chicken by getting up out of the way before you got squashed? I think we did that about two or three times when a police car pulls into my Grandmother’s driveway with lights flashing. One truck driver must have stopped at the Gulf Cafe (also on Highway 80) downtown and called Lauris.

Lauris was an imposing man. He rounded up me and Jimmie and marched us up to Ruby’s house and presented us to my Grandmother. Let’s just say that after the threat of being locked up by Lauris (jokingly, of course) and the talkin’ to we got from Ruby and Aunt Mabel, we no longer played in the highway. We still tried to get the trucks to honk their air horns but didn’t put anything else on the road to be flattened.

So nostalgic is that road to me that on my last cross country trip, once I got to Morton, I pulled over to the side of the road and took a photo of my Grandmother’s old house. For years, as a kid, I dreamed of leaving from there and heading west. By now, I had plenty of experience out west with boot camp in Alameda, California, a tour of duty in Corpus Christi, Texas, a job in Miles City, Montana with the Bureau of Land Management, and a previous cross country tour. However, it was totally symbolic for me to start my last journey out west on Highway 80 at my Grandmother’s house.

In the past, I’ve entertained the idea of traveling from Tybee Island, Georgia to San Diego on Highway 80 but the road now terminates in Dallas. It’s pretty much been replaced from Dallas westward by modern interstates.

The road still goes from Dallas to Savannah and there are portions all along the southern U.S. that you can drive on “old Highway 80.” As a matter of fact, behind my Great Grandparents house was a section of old Highway 80, so in effect, the house was bounded on the north by the old road and on the south by the “new” road. I used to hike that section of old Highway 80 to my Scoutmaster’s house 2.5 miles west. If you completed a round trip, that was a required five mile hike. Several of us in Troop 28 of Morton would make the hike, camp out on the area next to our Scoutmaster and then hike back the next morning. That way, we met one of the requirements for 21 nights of camping for the camping merit badge.

It was along that old section that I learned to look at nature. You’d find dragonflies impaled on the barbs of barbed wire by loggerhead shrikes. Our Scoutmaster Mr. Polk clued us in on the dragonflies, snakes, and rats staked out in the hot summer sun after we questioned him about it. It was along that section we caught and identified some of those same snakes. My love of botany was furthered when we learned to collect and press plants for a Scout exposition, many of which were collected along old Highway 80.

Going west where old 80 met new 80 just before you reached Pelahatchie, Mississippi you found the infamous Tiptoe Inn. Other than Ma Fortenberry’s on new 80, Tiptoe was the closest to get bootleg beer and liquor. Ma’s was closer to the town of Morton but you had to be pretty brazen to pull up to her drive and risk being seen by the locals. My parents were pretty brazen and I was often brought along for the ride. It was interesting to see who went to my church (Methodist) in town and who you could see at Ma’s. I once saw our minister.

Tiptoe had a seedier reputation than Ma’s. There were rumors of knife and gun fights and loose women (funny how women are considered loose but the men approaching them are not). I’d only been inside Tiptoe once and that was in broad daylight. It seemed like a clean but tired bar to me. The downstairs was just a long room with a bar that ran the length of it. The house of ill repute was upstairs. The saying about Tiptoe Inn was “tiptoe in, stagger out.”

It augments sperm volume, sperm count and sperm motility. cialis properien check out this now Why erection-helping medicines?If you get a look on available treatments for treating this condition there are some permanent surgical options available. viagra pfizer 100mg According to a study funded in large part to her tax haven status. generic sildenafil india Tadalafil is an effective medicine for people suffering from weak erection often feel shy in revealing their problem with friends and family. effects of viagra

Highway 80 ran directly through the center of Brandon. It split to either side of a confederate statue. The running joke was “Did you hear they took the statue down last week?” When you said no, the joke was “They had to let him down to take a leak.” OK, it’s small town humor in the 50’s. I think I was well into adulthood before people quit using that joke around me or me springing it on someone else.

As you continued west, 80 fed into Jackson. You crossed the Pearl River bridge just as you entered the Jackson city limits. Just before you crossed the bridge was another bootlegger. I knew all the bootleg places from Morton to Jackson as a kid. As you crossed the bridge, there was Dennery’s Seafood House.

At the time, that was pretty much the only place in central Mississippi you could get fresh seafood – they shipped it up daily from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I ate many a meal in that old building. Years later, they moved the restaurant near the Coliseum in Jackson. It was a brand new building with larger seating but it never caught on. By the way, I was in summer camp as a counselor and met the young son of the owner. I was invited for a free meal at the old restaurant after he passed my merit badge course.

Just under the Pearl River bridge was a place that made the absolute best hot tamales. Mom and Dad would often make a special trip (first stop the bootlegger on the other side of the bridge) to get the tamales. I’ve never had any since as good as those were. Of course, that could simply be the nostalgia talking but they were really good.

If you keep going west, you find yourself in Clinton, Mississippi. That town holds two memories for me: Mississippi College and Camp Kickapoo Boy Scout Camp. I was only on the campus of MC a couple of times in my life but it had a stately look to it. The only trouble in my mind was it was a Baptist supported college and everyone had to attend Chapel. Not for me.

If you broke north of Highway 80 in downtown Clinton, you hit a road that took you to Camp Kickapoo. I spent many summers there as a camper from Troop 28 in Morton and as a staff member and camp counselor.

Once you reach Vicksburg along Highway 80, you come to the western terminus of the state of Mississippi. Vicksburg’s claim to fame is tied up with someone named Grant. There’s a national battlefield but for some reason we were never encouraged to visit by the school systems in the state – something about a loss. It was full of Yankee monuments. Even so, I’ve visited it about three or four times. I guess I’m a traitor.

Vicksburg was also where my Grandfather Hollie often went to fight chickens. It was then, and is now, an illegal sport – but then so was beer and liquor at the time and that didn’t seem to stop anyone. My Grandfather was well known in chicken fighting circles common throughout the south (Florida still breaks up chicken fighting rings in the Hispanic communities of Miami). He’d even made the cover of some regional magazines.

I don’t know that this photo (from Jo) was taken in Vicksburg or not but it’s him at a chicken fight. He had many prized roosters.

Make no doubt about it, it’s a bloody, cruel sport. The roosters are fitted with sharpened steel spurs to do as much damage to the competition as possible. It’s often a fight to the death. Regardless, I think he thought more of his fighting cocks than he did about the family, in general. I used to walk with him to feed the chickens when I was a kid and was a little shocked that we often fed them – wait for it – left over chicken.

It was at one chicken fight in Vicksburg that I was with Hollie and Ruby when tornado warnings (fire sirens) went off. We left and headed back to Morton (along Highway 80, of course) and made it back safely. The next morning’s newspaper, The Clarion Ledger was full of articles about the devastation to Vicksburg by the tornadoes. I was always a little frightened about tornadoes after that point in time to the point I was close to anxiety attacks as a little kid. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not fond of them now but I understand them a little better and we certainly have a better warning system now than we did then – which was no warning system other than a fire siren.

By the way, the Lincoln Highway starts in New York City and ends in San Francisco at the Legion of Honor Museum. I’ve been to the starting point and the end point several times. It was also where a young lieutenant by the name of Dwight Eisenhower led a contingent across the country to open up highway travel to the nation. Even though the Lincoln Highway is the first transcontinental highway in the U.S. it doesn’t hold the same cachet to me that Highway 80 does.

Stay tuned and stay safe!

20 April 2021

My last post was the Agnew branch of the family. This post is about the Searcy branch of the family – which dies out with me.

Pulaski Mississippi is pretty much in the center of the state and is in Scott County. The unincorporated town was named after Casimir Pulaski of revolutionary war fame and more importantly, the town is located 7 miles southeast of Morton – of Agnew fame. Whereas Morton was an incorporated town of some 2000 souls, Pulaski was country – the sticks, the boonies. When I was a kid it had two stores (one once owned by my Grandfather Searcy) a wooden school house that was abandoned when the county schools consolidated, and two churches – Baptist and Methodist. The Baptist, was of course, the larger congregation. The Methodist was so small it had circuit ministers who would come preach every two Sundays but the Baptist had a full time minister.

Today, it still has two churches but the school house has been torn down. However, at the junction of highway 481 and the Morton-Marathon Road, it has a post office (39152). It’s hard to believe but at one time it was a thriving community. Both my Grandmother and Grandfather taught at the school at one time and it’s where my Dad and his siblings went to school. The area around the town was also part of the great lumber industry of central and south Mississippi where longleaf pine were harvested. It had railroad spur lines running close by to haul timber to the mills.

I loved that old school house. I don’t remember how many classrooms it had but it had a huge auditorium (at least it was big to me) and even a science lab. I think I have related in the past about finding my Dad’s lab notebook and found he was performing biology lab experiments in high school that I only performed in college.

For a long time the old abandoned school house was the local community building. It still had electricity and socials would often be held there. It was also where the two churches would have dinner on the ground. I remember attending at least two of these. The area around the school had wonderful old oak trees shading the grassy areas and people would literally spread blankets on the ground. Food was always placed on tables and you simply walked up to the table and chose your dishes and went back to your place on the blanket. Of course, you had to be judicious in your picks so you didn’t offend anyone by not selecting their particular dish. There was always a little preaching along with the eating and the entire process would last several lazy, warm hours in the summer.

I remember one time attending a dance party at the school. It was only me, my cousin Sybil Jean, and three or four of her friends along with their brothers. Since there weren’t enough boys for every girl to have a partner, the girls would dance together and eventually even we boys would dance together. Nothing in the building was locked so anyone could walk in, throw a party, and leave as long as they turned off the lights before leaving. For an old wooden structure with no oversight, you would think it would have eventually burned down – either through malice or rat eaten wiring but it never did. I think a county supervisor eventually had it demolished. I do wish it was still there.

As you headed south on highway 481 (now called Pulaski Road) from the metropolis you started a slow rise as you crossed Strong River. I was told Strong River was the longest river in the state (other than the Mississippi) and according to Wikipedia, it is 95.2 miles long and feeds into the Pearl River and thus the Gulf of Mexico. Along the bottom of the Strong River as it meanders across 481 I remember seeing my first beaver dams and lodges. Beavers, at the time, were considered pests that would flood necessary farm land and you would often hear the booms from dynamite blowing up the latest rendition of the beaver dam in that low area.

The 481 bridge across the river at Pulaski was, at the time, a wooden affair that would startle you as your car drove across the loose fitting planks. My Grandad always told how, in his day, the bridge was maintained by the community since there was no state highway department as such. Someone from the state would come by and round up local farmers who would bring their equipment and they would work as a community on the bridge.

At the top of the hill outside of Pulaski is Searcy Hill. My Great Grandfather settled on that land in the late 1800’s and he built the house we always called “The Old Place” from timber cut from the land and sawn on site.

The front of the house was ground level but the land dropped away significantly towards the back so you could walk under the house as an adult and still stand upright. I’ve done that many times over the years and admired the hand hewn beams that form the sills of the house above. The beams were 12″x 12″ and were pegged into place.

It was a classic old dogtrot house with an open breeze way between two sides of the house. The dogtrot was functional other than to dogs who would lie there to cool off. Any food that you wanted to cool you would place in the dogtrot – like homegrown watermelons! If you needed to further chill anything, you put it in a bucket and lowered it down into the well. Great Grandad dug the well by hand and it was 80 feet deep.

If you go look at it today, check out the window panes in the house. Some are relatively new because Dad replaced many of them but some are original to the house. Glass is considered an amorphous solid and over time, glass is affected by gravity. Some of the panes are paper thin at the top and thicker at the bottom. Dad always found most of the panes would fall out because the top would flow away from the fasteners at the top of the window.

As you face the house and to the left of the dogtrot was the front room. Grandmother Searcy’s quilting frame was in that room and raised to the ceiling to be out of the way until a bee was held. On the same side and behind that room was where Grandmother and Grandad slept when any of us kids slept over in the front room. Behind their room was the dining room and kitchen – all one huge room. The dining room table was huge – you literally could not reach across it. She cooked all her meals before sunrise on a wood burning stove.

The kitchen was sparse. It did have a fire place but what I most remember about it was the pie safe. Back then, refrigeration was rare and you stored things in a way to keep out the mice and yet keep things as cool as possible. The pie safe was the perfect answer. The doors were ventilated and mice couldn’t get in.

About 20 years ago, Dad was getting rid of some stuff and he asked me if I wanted anything. I immediately said the pie safe, the wash pot and the farm bell. He and Archie brought it down and I still have all three.

I don’t know exactly when Great Grandad built the house. The Searcy Cemetery across 441 has a sign that says 1885 but Dad told me that was off by a few years earlier. I assume the house predates the cemetery so the house was certainly built before 1883. Grandad was born in 1880.

buy sildenafil Teens and new drivers who are getting their license for the very first time than there are for new teen drivers. As a cardiologist, I have seen that this file is highly effective. generic viagra generic Also known sildenafil levitra appalachianmagazine.com as male impotence, erectile dysfunction is treated with appropriate consumption of medicine. Lack of order levitra online ovulation and sperm deficiencies are the most common sexual troubles.

Grandad grew up at the Old Place and eventually took over the place. His farm consisted of 120 acres. Thirty acres was the home site and across the west side of 481 was 80 acres of farmed land which included part of some Strong River bottomland. He left the homestead to all three children and gave each of the three children 40 acres of the farmland.

Actually, there were four children. Grandad married Nola Eugenia Hurst. I assume the photos are their wedding pictures.

The first child was Albert Hurst Searcy in 1911. He was stillborn. The oldest of the three surviving children was my Aunt Sue, Ena Sue Searcy in 1912. Next came my Dad, Frederick Taylor Searcy, Sr. The Taylor comes from our Uncle Taylor Hurst, Grandmother’s brother.

Uncle Ray came along in 1919. He and Dad were two peas in a pod. When I was a kid walking down the streets of Morton, I would call out to my Dad and Uncle Ray would turn around.

I’ve related about my Dad joining the Civilian Conservation Corps but Uncle Ray was too young and ended up staying on the farm and plowing. When WWII broke out he was for a time stationed at the Panama Canal Zone.

Aunt Sue married M.R. (Jack) Risher – a whole ‘nother branch of the family.

They lived closer to Morton – you might say the suburbs of Pulaski. Any time I went to visit Grandad and Grandmother, I always stopped in at Aunt Sue and Uncle Jack’s. Uncle Jack farmed and worked at the Co-Op in Forest. Aunt Sue made sure you had something to eat every time you visited whether you were hungry or not. It was mandatory you be fed.

Uncle Ray married Minrose Green. She and her brothers lived in downtown Pulaski, next to one of the two general stores.

Uncle Ray was pretty much of the temperament of my Dad. They didn’t really show emotion – neither did Aunt Sue. Aunt Minrose was exuberant and outgoing. I loved all of them but whenever Aunt Minrose was around everyone started laughing and having fun. She was, for many years, the town operator – back when you had to go through a switchboard for a phone call. She later retired with the phone company with a decent pension. It was always exciting to pick up the phone and ask for a number to be dialed and find out it was Aunt Minrose on duty that day.

Grandmother Searcy had several brothers and sisters. She was the second youngest of eight children. She was born in 1887. George Gibson Hurst was the oldest of the eight born in 1874. Then Florence Melissa Hurst (1877) James Taylor Hurst – my and Dad’s namesake – (1880) Annie Belle Hurst (1882) Helen Fay Hurst (1885) Rolfe Hunt Hurst (1890) and Wilburn Magruder Hurst in 1898.

On the Old Place was a blacksmith shop, a barn, a smokehouse and a chicken coop.

I remember the entire clan gathering on Saturdays. Grandmother would lay out a tremendous spread of food for lunch – all cold because you had to be an idiot to light a wood burning stove in the summer – and we’d all sit around that massive table and eat and talk and laugh. In the afternoon it was watermelon cutting time and we kids would have seed spitting contests off the back porch. There was always a bucket of water with a dipper on the back porch for when you got thirsty and if it got low, you had to go to the well and get more water with a well bucket and windlass.

Summer was a magical time out there. I mentioned the dinner on the ground services but there was also plum season. On the 40 acres of land that Dad was given was a large plum thicket and you could pick two or three bucketfuls in short order. We’d take the buckets back to Grandmother who turned two of the buckets into plum jelly and we kids would polish off one of the buckets. Wild plum jelly is still my favorite jelly.

I learned to shell butterbeans and peas from my Grandmother. Grandad taught me about seed corn and how to shell corn from the cob and how to wipe my ass with a fuzzy corn cob in the outdoor two holer. I took rain showers with lye soap that Grandmother had made. I climbed the magnolia tree in front and got all dirty again. Sybil Jean and I made mud pies in the dirt in front of the house (Grandmother swept the lawn with a broom sage broom – it was the cleanest dirt in town) and we’d pretend to eat them. I learned some of my first flower names from Grandmother’s flower garden and the begonias she grew hanging from pots on the porch. We were very spoiled grandkids and it wasn’t money that spoiled us. I rode my first horse there. I slept in my first feather bed there. I drank milk just pulled from a cow’s udder. And I watched the flames in my first fireplace there. I followed Grandaddy like a dog soaking up his expertise, his soft way of thinking and talking and how he carried himself. Grandmother Searcy’s hugs were really the only kind I had much of as a child and they were enthusiastic, loving, and enveloping.

I can think of a lot of things I’ve enjoyed in my life but my life as a kid at the Old Place was simply idyllic. It enriched me like no other life experience.

Stay safe and stay tuned!

19 April 2021

It’s been nostalgia week at 16th St. I’ve been so bored I’ve begun digitizing all my old photos and have run into memory freezes where Jimmie and Jo have bailed me out and memory explosions with the process of transferring photos to jpegs. It appears the Agnew side of the family is as well documented as the Searcy side of the family.

It all started a while ago when Jimmie asked if I had any photos of our Pawpaw’s and Othermamma’s place in Morton. I didn’t think so and passed that request on to my brother Archie in Brandon, Mississippi. He looked but couldn’t turn up any of the house either. Jimmie, Jean, Jo, Archie and I used to play under the house and we all agreed on that. Turns out we must have been very, very small to be playing under that house since it really wasn’t that high off the ground.

Every so often, as I digitized a photo, I would shoot it off to all of us via text. Jo would often send me back photos I had not seen before of the Agnew clan.

I don’t have any record or recollection of Pawpaws parents but I do remember him. His name was James B. Agnew, Sr. He married Othermamma (Mandy E. Thompson) and I have no records of her parents either. However Great Grandad Jim and Great Grandmother Mandy had seven children. The oldest was Delia (we called her Deelee) followed by Velma, Hollie, Alice, Edna Lee, James, Jr. and the youngest was Ernestine. Although I was the youngest of my cousins and brother, I remember each of them well and have vivid recollections of each. Let’s just say they were all very unique individuals and each had their own problems and demons (and hopefully and angel or two on their shoulders).

I mostly remember Pawpaw playing what is now known as the mouth organ but back then had a more disreputable name. He would entertain us after lunch. They had a huge dining room table – two adults and seven kids, wives and husbands, and grandkids. I never remember Othermamma other than bedridden. I don’t recollect ever seeing her out of her bed.

Of all of them, Great Uncle James was my favorite. He had an aura about him that just made you feel good. In his later years he had some real problems but I remember when I was around 10 or 11, he would always listen to Paul Harvey on the radio at noon. I got in the habit of dropping around – not to visit Jimmie, Jean or Jo but to visit with Uncle James and listen to the radio show with him. There wasn’t a chair in the room that I remember and I remember he told me just to climb up on the bed with him. We’d listen to Paul and after his sign off we would sometimes discuss what we heard and he’d let me know his thinking on a particular issue. What struck me was he never talked down to me as a kid but treated me as an adult in our conversations. I loved Paul Harvey for many years after that. I might also add that Uncle James was a dapper dresser and probably the best looking of the Agnews – including the women in the family.

You might be surprise to know that I wasn’t all that close to my own Grandfather Hollie. He had a stern look about him and he often looked like he carried the world on his shoulder. At one time he was a raging alcoholic but when I knew him I never saw him take a drink. He had the fierce Agnew temper and he and my Grandmother Ruby would get into cursing fights – after first going to church service Sunday mornings. I was a little afraid of him and always hid behind Ruby when he came into the room. I suspect that frustrated him terribly that I didn’t warm up to him. However, I think Archie loved him enough for the both of us.

Some of you may know the song by John Prine “Grandpa Was A Carpenter.” There’s a line in there about chain smoking Camel cigarettes. Hollie chain smoked Lucky Strikes. The song also talks about “put a penny in a burned out fuse.” Hollie did that with their fuse box and I learned that trick from him. Totally unsafe but it certainly worked. Actually pretty much everything word of that song reminds me of Hollie. He wasn’t a carpenter but he owned and ran Agnew Hardware in Morton.

Ernestine lived in Bessemer, Alabama and I think Uncle Bivin worked with steel mills of Birmingham. What I remember about her was her wonderfully loud, full throated laugh, her piano playing, and her filling me up with food. Uncle Bivin was good natured and didn’t seem to mind when a bunch of the Agnew sisters descended on his house – however, I do remember him sitting outside the house having a smoke when all the women got together. I didn’t get to see Ernestine too often because of the distance but Ruby would drive us over there at least once a year.

Bivin and Ernestine had two children: Terry and Amanda Lee. I don’t remember Terry at all even though I’m sure I met him. However, Amanda Lee was, in my mind, the most beautiful child I’ve ever seen. She grew up into an equally beautiful woman.

Androgenic Alopecia (Male Baldness) Commonly known as male enhancement drugs which help to treat erectile dysfunction. cialis pill Fibromyalgia pain has been discount buy viagra characterized as a central pain disorder arising from a dysfunctional pain modulation system. Relationship Troubles Relationship troubles affect the delight of lovemaking. online viagra order On the other hand, there is a hypothesis involving bacteria, viruses or other foreign substances. buy viagra prescription

Edna Lee lived next door to Hollie and Ruby and Jimmie and I would often go see her. She was deaf although I didn’t realize it for many years. She was an excellent lip reader and it was only when Jimmie told me I had to look at Aunt Eddy when I spoke to her that I realized she was deaf. What I really remember about her was she would carefully peel and apple for Jimmie and me and cut it up into pieces for us to eat. Her husband was Oliver Prince and sadly, he became an alcoholic. He outlived Aunt Eddy by several years despite the alcoholism. I remember going to see him once when we lived in Brandon and he was somewhat of a shadow of his former self.

I guess since Aunt Eddy was deaf, she had a precision to her language and a rhythm to how she spoke. It was almost a whispered voice. She was the second of the Agnew children to pass away and like Othermamma, she was bedridden for the last part of her life. Hollie was the first to die – of a massive heart attack – in 1956. Eddy died in 1957.

Of all the Agnew children, I probably knew Velma the least. Every so often Ruby would drive over to Jackson and we would stop in and visit her and Uncle Shep but it was a long while before I realized just who Velma was. I didn’t know she was one of the five sisters until much later. Mother liked Velma better than any of the other sisters and once I figured out who Velma was, Mother would take me to visit her at the upstairs apartment she and Uncle Shep had.

She had one son, George Brooks. With the last name of Brooks, I assume Aunt Velma had been previously married. I think I remember her as a nurse.

Aunt Alice was just mean. I don’t know that she meant to be but that was certainly how she came across. She always reminded me of the woman Toto bit in the Wizard of Oz and wanted to have Toto put down. Either she mellowed a little later in life or I tolerated her better because she eventually took over trying to teach me piano. She married Owen Lack and they had two girls: Margie and Beth. Both of those girls were led down the path of iniquity by my Mother. I think I previously related the theft of my Grandfather’s truck by this trio to go to Jackson.

For some strange reason, I have no photos of Alice!

Delia was Delia. She came across as a ditz but I suspect that was an act on her part to put up with Alice all those years. Delia married George Searcy (no relation) and after he passed away, she and Alice were pretty much intertwined.

Uncle George doted on Delia. He did everything. He cooked, he cleaned, he washed. Delia just lived.

Jo and I have talked about Delia a good bit and we both remember that what ever song Delia played on the piano, all the songs sounded the same. She could, however, pound out a rousing rendition of “Monkey, Monkey, Bottle of Beer.” I still remember that damn song!

I don’t have a photo of Delia either but she, to me, looked a lot like Velma.

As a child, I had a cornucopia of Agnew relatives. Think of having a Grandfather, a Great Uncle, and five Great Aunts. Delia, Alice, James, Edna Lee and Hollie all lived within shouting distance of each other. Only Velma and Ernestine flew the coop. I grew up with Jimmie, Jean and Jo and Archie but didn’t have much interaction with Beth, Margie, Terry, Amanda Lee and George Brooks.

The Searcy side of the family was much smaller. I had one Aunt (Sue) and one Uncle (Ray). Sue had two children (Jean and Charles) and Uncle Ray had one (Regina). To be honest, you could be overwhelmed at Agnew family gatherings but there was certainly never a dull moment – the laughter, the squabbling, the shouting and the tears all kept you on your toes. If Jo sends me pictures of Delia and Alice, I’ll post them in a later post.

Stay tuned and stay safe!

7 April 2021

I’ve traveled extensively in the United States. A lot when I was a kid when Dad was in the military, a lot with my grandmother Ruby – I was her chaperone – some while I was in the Coast Guard, and a lot after I retired from teaching.

I’ve not done a lot of international travel. I’ve been to Mexico, Canada, and the Bahamas close to home. Across the pond I’ve been to Spain, Scotland, England, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Of all the places I’ve been, my favorite is Paris.

I’ve been to Paris three times. My first time was with Steve Miller in 1985 just after I moved to Florida and took up my teaching career with Broward Community College. I had just gotten a $14K raise by joining the faculty at BCC from my last teaching position at Itawamba Junior College and I wanted to go so badly to Europe I could taste it. I casually mentioned it to Steve. He had just broken up with his girlfriend and he wanted to get out of town.

Steve flew down to Hollywood/Fort Lauderdale International Airport and we left out of Miami to Heathrow. I had booked a room with two beds at a B&B in London. It was the pits! The beds were twin beds and the shower was down the hall. Everyone raves about the “typical” English breakfast. They served it at the B&B but it was the greasiest thing I’ve ever eaten. It was probably great for hangovers but I didn’t have one. My greatest memories of London were Kew Gardens and The British Museum.

We spent two days in London and then we took a ferry from Dover to Calais and then Eurorail to Brussels. The place we had in Brussels was plush and worth the money we spent on it. We spent a night in Brussels touring the tourist areas and then headed to Amsterdam. I’ve never been so uncomfortable in my life as that time in Amsterdam. There were pickpockets everywhere. We stayed at a youth hostel very close to the Rembrandt Museum. We made the obligatory visit to the Bulldog Cafe but we didn’t partake – only the hot chocolate.

Next we headed by rail to Paris. I had no reservations and we had to simply shop around. The first place was so filthy we couldn’t stay there. I eventually found us a place on the Left Bank and the room was great. It was about this time that Steve got homesick for his girlfriend. We were scheduled to head back to London and then into Scotland but he caught a flight out of Heathrow for home. I have no idea how much that flight cost him but it must have been a pretty penny. In any case, I went on to Scotland on my own.

In any case, I did get to go up in the Eiffel Tower, see Versailles, walk through the Arch de Triomphe and sit at an outdoor cafe and sip un vin rouge. I also got to do long walks along the Seine and check out the book stalls. It was love at first sight! I did get to see the Louvre and I spent most of one day there.

You need to use this herbal treatment to improve india online cialis sex drive without any hesitation. In this manner the online discount cialis man can at least discuss about his disorder and they can simply plan a way out of the disease. Side effects : Less serious side effects : Warmth or redness in your face, neck, or mid-section; stuffy nose; headache cheapest viagra generic memory issues back torment We serve the needs of drop delivery for online drug stores by giving quality marked and generic items at most focused costs. It is rich in phytochemicals to increase sex drive naturally and generic levitra online enhance lovemaking experience.

All I wanted to do after that was to go back to Paris.

I think it was 1989 when I went back the second time. It was Christmas and I spent Christmas day wandering around the streets of a very cold, very wet Paris. I loved it.

I stayed at the Novotel Paris Les Halles. As you can tell by the name, it was close to Les Halles which was pretty much in decay when I visited – a ghost of what once was. However, Le Centre Pompidou was fairly new and I got to visit that. I became a pretty good traveler on Le Metro and even visited my first French gay bar. I can tell you Jack Daniels, at the time, was very, very expensive.

To be honest, I simply roamed the streets of Paris in the rain. Most of the city was shut down for the holidays so I didn’t have the crowds of spring and summer. I kind of liked it like that.

My last trip was in 2012 as part of the French Country Waterways barge tour of Bourgogne. We all flew into Paris. The company put us up in the Hotel Regina which was near the Ste. Joan of Arc statue at Rue de Rivoli and Rue des Pyramides. I was in a very small room at the top of the hotel. The good news was it was very near the Louvre and the Tuileries. I splurged and spent and extra day before the tour began and an extra day after the tour finished. It was worth it.

This was the most expensive trip I’ve ever taken. I flew business class from Miami to Paris and back. The barge tour itself was eight days of all food and wine provided. The extra days at the hotel added up much less eating in Paris when the Euro was doing much better against the dollar. I would not have changed a thing!

For a video of Paris scenes, click here.

Stay tuned!

6 April 2021

One year when I was teaching at Itawamba Junior College, we had a guest speaker for the faculty. She, herself, had been a former faculty member at the college. Therefore, I was a little taken aback by one of her comments. She said “Everyone needs a little mistletoe to pin to their coattail.” It was her way of saying everyone needs a fall-back job so you can walk off your current job and tell people to kiss your ass. I liked that idea.

I hired on at Broward Community College in 1985 and immediately began to search for some mistletoe. I decided to try to get into the Library and Information Science program at Florida State University, in other words study to become a librarian. I didn’t realize it at the time but FSU’s program was considered as equals with other nationally known programs like at Cornell. If I had known it was so tough to get in, I probably wouldn’t have applied.

I got called for an interview for the program by the dean of the school in Tallahassee and took a couple of days leave to make the interview. I made it in and was pleased. My intention was to attend during summer sessions and I enrolled for the Summer of 1986.

FSU’s program dovetailed nicely with my teaching duties at BCC. I had to teach the first summer session at BCC which left me a summer session at FSU.

My first classes were Information and Library Science, Bibliographic Organization (better known as cataloging), Conservation and Preservation of Library Materials, and Practical Conservation Techniques.

Finding a place to stay in Tallahassee presented a challenge but I did manage to get into a men’s dormitory. My roommate was from “the Islands” as he called them but it was really Jamaica. The only thing I remember about him was he was most often away from the dorm and that he never changed the sheets on his bed the entire semester. Otherwise, he was a cool roommate. It was typical dorm life with the difference of allowing females in the dorm overnight. I always checked for a sock on the door knob of my room before entering. My last dormitory experience was at Ole Miss where females had to check in and out of their dorm and were not allowed to wear pants on campus. Progress for women!

I was additionally pleased to learn that FSU also offered LIS classes at satellite campuses and one was in my area – Florida International University on the north Miami campus. I took Computers in Libraries in the spring of 1987 at FIU.

The next summer session was in Tallahassee and I promised myself to do better than the dorm environment. FSU had married student housing and there were vacancies for summer terms. I snagged an apartment. It was one of the dirtiest places I’ve ever seen. The previous occupants had not cleaned the tub the entire fall and spring terms. I scrubbed the bathroom from top to bottom, the kitchen from top to bottom and every floor in the house. It took me a week just to clean the place.

It was this semester I was introduced to one of my fellow students Sandy, from Michigan. She was a total card and very gregarious. She always threw a cocktail party at her apartment (same married student housing). She would tell me her love life from home, her affairs at FSU and ask my advice about breakups. She was my closest friend at FSU and we stayed in touch for years afterwards.

Her major professor was Alphonse Trezza. I never had a class with him but we became friendly through Sandy which was to have consequences much later at BCC.

FSU’s masters program in Library and Information Science didn’t just train you to be a librarian. It assumed all of its graduates would one day be administrators of libraries. As a consequence, you were required to take several different courses in library administration. For Summer 1987 I took Information Services, Library and Information Center Management, Advanced Cataloging and Classification, and Serial Control and Special Libraries.

I had taken the same professor for three courses: Conservation and Preservation of Library Materials, Practical Conservation Technique and Serial Control and Special Libraries. What was interesting about the guy was he was a former officer in the U.S. Coast Guard. When he found that I was a former Coastie, he became at lot more at ease around me. One day I found in my mailbox a book of matches with the USCGC Reliance – my old cutter – on the cover of the matches.

For his Serials course, one of the projects I had to do was to create a system to automate serial collections. I chose a database associated with an Apple computer – my first experience with those – and eventually got something to work enough to satisfy him.

Therefore, as early warning signs of kidney cancer, patients who have these symptoms, should not forget to check the urinary online cialis discover this system. A kamagra oral jelly 100mg is available for purchase in online drugstores. no prescription cialis Some viagra samples migraine sufferers may experience a visual aura without a headache. A few of these components were somatic or alternatively intellectual, in addition the particular physique is likely to prepare on their own of cope with the actual external threat. cialis prescription see now now

In the fall of 1987 I was able to take three classes as FIU: Administrative Problems in Science Librarianship, Problems and Studies in Librarianship (another management course) and Program Synthesis and Evaluation. By this time I had three courses in management. They were strong on how to evaluate personnel working in your department. As it turned out, I ended up with more management courses to my résume than any of the administrators at BCC. All their degrees were in their specific major – not management. Perhaps that explains a lot.

Back to a third semester at Tallahassee, I took Science and Technology Reference Work and Collection Management. The guy who taught the first course was the guy who did the original research for the Food and Drug Administration that led to chlorination of water. The faculty at the school of LIS was one of the strongest I’ve ever seen. The catalog instructor, for example, was once the head cataloger at the Library of Congress.

Back at FIU in the fall of 1988, I took my last class: Foundations of Librarianship. I received my Master of Science degree on December 10, 1988.

I loved Tallahassee. Sandy and I would hang out at the bars. We’d eat dinner and then proceed to get drunk. The bars were all within walking distance of campus so it wasn’t a problem. I was stag one afternoon at one of my favorite bars when a waitress comes us and stares at me. She was a former student of mine at BCC. She looked at me and said “You’re class in biology was the toughest class I’ve ever had in my life.” I was doing oysters on the half shell and I was worried she might try to sabotage me but she didn’t, thank goodness.

I don’t think I took but one or two courses at FSU/FIU that didn’t require a term paper. Often, I would have three term papers a semester and once I had four. You know me – Mr. Anal. When the papers were announced at the beginning of class, I immediately headed to the library and began to do the research. Never put off today what you can do today was my motto. As a consequence, towards the end of the summer session when everyone was panicking and trying to find the materials for their papers, I had mine finished and already typed and ready to turn in. Sandy hated me.

It was also there I continued my swimming. When I moved to Hollywood in 1985, I joined the Hollywood YMCA and got back into swimming for the first time since summer camp as a kid. They had a junior size Olympic pool and I worked my way up to a mile swim.

FSU had an outdoor pool that was Olympic size and I continued doing that every summer. I was doing a mile a day in the pool. In the mornings or afternoons (if I couldn’t get in the pool) I would jog. You’ve never sweated until you’ve jogged in Tallahassee in the summer. I was up to five miles a day jogging. My favorite place to jog was the college track. It had some type of surface that was easy on your feet. I often shared the track with the FSU football team running sprints or the FSU track team. It was there I learned to eat watermelon after jogging to put back not only the water but sugars and minerals. I use that to this day even though I don’t jog any more – the concrete jungle of Fort Lauderdale pounded my back too much.

Remember Alphonse Trezza? I was back teaching at BCC many years later when I was union president. The college on Central Campus was next to the Florida Atlantic University branch campus (FAU’s main campus is in Boca Raton). There was a deal where FAU would build a new library building on BCC Central Campus (with supplemental funding by BCC) for both campuses.

During one of my weekly checks of faculty on Central, I ran into Neil Linger, a BCC librarian. I found out that the president of BCC was planning to make all the librarians in the new building FAU librarians. Either our librarians at BCC had to be hired by FAU (unlikely) or they would be out of a job. I asked the president of our college about this and he said yes, that was true, the consultant BCC/FAU hired had recommended it. Casually, I asked who the consultant was. He said a Dr. Trezza from FSU. I asked to speak of the consultant.

I walked in and Dr. Trezza immediately remembered me and we got to talking about Sandy. He didn’t know where she ended up and I gave him her address. I finally got around to ask him if it was true that he recommended the librarians all be associated with FAU. He said yes since it was a university and BCC at the time was just a two year college. I knew Trezza was a union man through and through. I told him the librarians at FAU were not considered faculty and thus were not represented by the campus union. I said our librarians at BCC are considered faculty and as a consequence, are unionized. He changed the recommendation. Today, the majority of the librarians on Central campus are Broward College faculty. I loved being able to help out the librarians on Central and they were very appreciative. I was making my way back to Central for another weekly walk through and even I didn’t know at the time Trezza had changed the recommendation. I walked into the Central library and I was immediately surrounded by the entire library faculty and patted on the back. They thanked me for saving their job. I didn’t really, I just planted the seed in the right person’s mind!

Several times, I thought about leaving the college and going into librarianship. Each time I changed my mind. Part of it was how poorly college librarians were paid. I remember reading one ad for a position, I think at Troy State (then) University in Troy, Alabama. They wanted a science library who had a masters in science and a masters in library and information science and they were willing to pay the princely sum of $16k/year. High school teachers in Broward made around $40k/year at the time.

I used my library science degree a lot. First there was the work with Stonewall. However, I also asked my students to do research papers at BCC and I was the one that gave them the library tour and showed them how to use indices and which ones to use. I taught them online searching techniques and that when all else fails, ask the reference librarian. One of my students reported back to me that they never had trouble researching material for papers since my class. Not only did I benefit from my degree, so did my students.

Stay tuned!

5 April 2021

In 1994, I completed two terms as faculty senate president and United Faculty of Florida chapter president and had pretty much mentally crashed. So what do you do to get over some trauma but dive into more trauma?

I was looking to make a difference somewhere. I figured that since I had a masters in Library and Information Science from Florida State University, why not put that to use by volunteering at the Stonewall Library and Archives.

A little history…. It’s my understanding that in 1972, Mark Silber, a local in Fort Lauderdale, donated his collection of gay and lesbian books and magazines to create Stonewall Library and Archives, named in honor of the Stonewall riots of 1969.

For quite a while, the collection was simply housed in Mark’s parents house but eventually found its way into a classroom at the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC). Somewhere around 1983, it merged with the Boca Raton based Southern Gay Archives. When I inquired about volunteering the collection was housed at 1146 East Oakland Park Blvd. on the fourth floor. It was pretty much crammed into three small office spaces. At the time, the Gay and Lesbian Community Center (GLCC) was located in the same building and took up the entire third floor. I mistakenly assumed the library was part of the GLCC. The GLCC did offer some financial support (paid the rent) but the two organizations have always been separate.

In 1997 (I think) I started volunteering one night a week. While there, I tried sorting out the periodical collection. That was my job when I was a work study student at the University of Mississippi Library. It was also my interest when I got my degree in library science. There was one other consistent volunteer, Ed Fojoe and he was working towards his library science degree while working for the university library at Florida International University. John Graves was president of the board.

John was the major benefactor of the library. I knew of John because many years ago when I taught at Itawamba Junior College I applied for a Chautauqua course on the history of science and it was conducted by John. I didn’t make the cut that year for the course but for some reason his name stuck with me. John majored in physics at Princeton and got his PhD in philosophy. His thesis was titled “Conceptional Foundations of Contemporary Relativity.”

When once asked about how he acquired his money, he said it wasn’t inherited nor was it any great effort on his part. He bought stock in Intel at fifty cents a share on a recommendation of a friend.

In any case, I started going to board meetings for Stonewall and got more involved with volunteering. Before long, I found myself as president of the library. I had no desire to be president after my stint with the union and the faculty senate but it was either me or no one. I was selected by default.

About the time I was made president, we were forced off the fourth floor and onto the floor below with the GLCC. We went from three rooms to two. Something had to give. We moved the periodicals collection to a storage facility and I operated out of there for at least three years.

While at the storage facility, I tried to computerize the records of the collection based on a database that one of our volunteers, Bob Ewart, provided. About this time I met Paul Fasana.

Paul, and his partner, Dr. Robert Graham, were very interesting people. Paul was a first generation college graduate and became a librarian and eventually worked his way up to Senior Vice President and Andrew W. Mellon Director of Research Libraries of the New York Public Library. He was one of the first to experiment with automating the checkout process in libraries. I like to believe we came good friends. Sadly, he passed away this year. He partner Robert was the lead physician for a major insurance company (and neurologist) and was also appointed by Reagan to some national committee. Robert and Paul were welcomed graciously into the Reagan Whitehouse.

Anyway, Paul and I would slave away at the storage facility trying to collate the collection, pull any duplicate issues and generally organize the periodical collection. Any duplicates we put aside as trade specimens with other libraries. We even got a trade going with Cornell University. The light in the storage facility was dismal, the space cramped, and the air condition only sometimes worked.

In the meantime, I was finding out what a 501(c)3 organization was. It’s a nonprofit that allows donations to be tax deductible. To maintain your status as a 501(c)3, you had to file an annual report with the state of Florida. Going through the filing cabinet, I could only find one or two of these and they were a single page. I was horrified to realize the library and archives had not submitted one in years – we could lose our status. I approached the board with the idea of using the annual report as a publicity tool to pull in donors. I worked to put together a little more polished report. I think it was around 15 or 20 pages and I asked the board to approve an expenditure to have it printed. I think they were going to balk until John Graves spoke up and set he would pay the cost of printing. We used that annual report all year to publicize the library and attract donors. The library and archives has since that time put together a very professional annual report every year. I did annual reports with Rob Nathans for the next six years. The library continues to publish them to this day.

Move ahead a year and the GLCC found a new location off Andrews Avenue in Fort Lauderdale. That meant we had to move the library again. We’re talking several thousand books here. John again to the rescue. He hired a moving company that specializes in moving libraries and we shifting operations to Andrews Avenue at the old Shriner’s building. (It still had the funny cars inside.)

John had our back. He was a major contributor not only to the library and archives but also the GLCC so he insured we would get a larger space (to the right of the entrance awning in the center of the building). Unfortunately, it needed significant renovation. It required a brand new a/c unit, carpeting, new shelving, and where we would put the archive/periodical collection was a garage for the funny cars. We needed to raise the floor level 8 inches with poured concrete. We had an architect that designed the space to our needs. I have to admit the construction contractor was very attentive to the library’s needs.

As we were getting ready to renovate, Rob Nathans and I wrote the first grant for the library for shelving for the archives. We combed through every possible grant giving organization in the U.S. to see who might be willing to fund a project at Stonewall. We finally reached out to Larry Ellison of Oracle and his foundation. We were funded. The condition was we had to raise matching funds with new donations – not existing ones. We reached out to the Division of Libraries with the state of Florida and received some funds from them, from John Graves and from Paul Fasana and several others. We made the match. We spent that on new shelving for the library and for the archives.

Paul asked me what type of shelving I was thinking about and I asked him for suggestions. He came up with compact shelving. It was a lot more expensive than our grant but he made up the difference and even later purchased more compact shelving.

We also managed to get flat shelving for posters and maps and archive quality boxes to replace the cheap boxes we had been storing the collections in. I purchased as many archival supplies as the budget would allow.

But, it should be remembered that these medicines need sexual india tadalafil tablets stimulation to work as these are not aphrodisiac in nature. 5. The web chemists suggest generic http://cute-n-tiny.com/tag/bear/ cialis generic tabs options in addition to offering branded drugs. TIPS TO ENHANCE SEXUAL STAMINA If you are anticipating staying active maximum time in bed, we are here to super cialis cheap be a witness of god’s love. Androgen side effects are typically not an issue with Nandrolone Decanoate in steroid cycles since these two steroids have a synergistic effect in the body. viagra cialis generico

We moved the periodical collection into the new space and set up shop. It was a wonderful leap in progress.

Every so often we would have someone come into the library and say “I wrote that book!” As president, I figured why not take advantage of Fort Lauderdale weather. After all, people flocked here during the winter. Why not contact some authors and ask if they wanted to come down and do a reading and sign some books for sale? We couldn’t pay them any money but I thought why not ask the guest houses if they would put them up for free?

Fort Lauderdale has a lot of gay guest houses scattered throughout Fort Lauderdale, Oakland Park, and Wilton Manors. The Broward County/Miami/Dade County/Palm Beach County area has the second largest gay population in the United States. New York is number 1, we are number 2 and San Francisco is number 3. I think at the time there were something like 12-15 gay guest houses.

I would get an author to make a commitment to come down and do a reading on a specific date. I then sent out a blanket email to the guest houses asking if anyone had a vacancy they could put the author up for free. Generally, this was “in season” for the guest houses and there often were no vacancies. However, I was amazed when within minutes of sending out the first email request, I got two or three replies saying yes. The others sent regrets but asked to be kept on the mailing list. I was so proud of those gay guest houses.

The one time I was getting desperate was when only one guest house replied that they have an availability. It was a guest house that specialized in bondage and discipline and even advertised that all the rooms had a sling hanging from the ceiling ready for their patrons. I had no choice. I had to put the author up in the B&D B&B. He loved it! He extended his stay at his own expense. Whew!

Also coming on board to volunteer was Hugh Ripley. He had been the head librarian at St. Thomas University. Our collection was getting huge from donations of books and periodical and artifacts. Since I began volunteering, the library had been using the Dewey Decimal System for classification. It was unwieldy, particularly when people got their decimals confused. A lot of patrons thought a book ending with 0.5 was found before 0.10 because 10 is greater than 5. We also had a problem with volunteers shelving fiction books since they were shelved by author. If there was no author, then by title. If by title, was the word “The” at the beginning of a title significant? It was a mess.

Hugh and I met with our Chief Librarian, Steve Kerr, a retired librarian from the Broward County Library system and we agreed that we were a research library as well as an average reader library. It particularly made sense for the archives. We shifted to the Library of Congress classification system. Most of our titles were already in the LC system and all we had to do was look up the LC classification add the that to the spine of the book. Most of our collection was not in the Dewey Decimal System which meant you had to classify it on your own and decipher Cutter numbers for the books.

Steve Kerr did the impossible and completely converted the collection to LC within two years. Much later, after I left the library, they converted the fiction back to Dewey, so sadly, they now have two systems of classification in the building.

One of the authors I invited down was James T. Sears from the University of South Carolina. He was, at the time, an historian at the University of South Carolina and he specialized in, among other things, GLBTQ history. He came down several times over the years and he liked what we were doing so much he donated his entire collection of materials on GLBTQ history to the archives. You can see some of the holdings of the archives here.

After we started the fancy annual reports, we started getting more and more donations of materials to the archives and when they walked into the archives and saw the organized materials on the compact shelving, that sold them into giving us more materials and funding. One guy I showed around the archives walked away impressed and he later sent me a check for $2000.

Another thing we instituted was an emergency preparedness plan. After all, we live in a hurricane zone. We made sure we had access to a company that refrigerated trucks to store water damaged materials. During several close calls we wrapped the compact shelving in plastic. We had a printed plan in place and it was reviewed every year.

After my two initial terms as president, I became Chief Archivist (a lot of my training at FSU was in preservation and conservation). I was even invited to present a paper to the state library association at a meeting in St. Augustine. They were thrilled to hear of the success of the library and archives. The state archivist, who helped channel some funds to us for the compact shelving, asked for before and after pictures – that you see in this blog – so they could publish them in their newsletter. Remember, this funding from the state was during a fairly moderate Republican governor. As far as I know the library and archives has never received any more funding from the state as the state government has become more right wing. Fortunately, corporations, the city and county government have been more forthcoming.

Just before I left the library, the archives initiated an oral history project. It went on hiatus after I left but has since been brought back. One of the simplest things we did was to immediately write letters of appreciation for donations and explaining to the donor we were a 501(c)3 organization and as such, their donation was tax deductible. This had been an on again/off again process and I made sure it became a priority as president.

Apparently one donor did not receive his letter. He walked into the library and loudly complained to all his donation of magazines was not appreciated. John Graves took him by the arm and walked him out and said “Listen, we are an all-volunteer organization – give us a break.”

I worked with the library and archives for seven years. Most of what I did I could not have done without the help of Rob Nathans. After seven years and a lot of acrimony among board members, both Rob and I resigned.

After I left, the library moved into a section of the old city of Fort Lauderdale library. The building was owned by the city but the land is owned by the county (or vice versa). The majority of the building is taken up by ArtServe but a section was reserved for Stonewall. The name was changed to Stonewall National Museum & Archives. Of course, the mayor of Fort Lauderdale at the time, Jim Naugle, claimed we had pornographic material in the collection. Of course we did. We collected everything GLBTQ related included porn. It’s just not available to the general public. You have to be a researcher in order to access that material.

Originally our mission was to collect and preserve any GLBTQ material from a boundary south of Washington, DC, west to the Mississippi. It has since become a national collection. Probably the only thing close to Stonewall in size is the archive in San Francisco and I know of no other library with the number of volumes of GLBTQ books.

When I first became a volunteer we had around 10,000 volumes. Today the library has 28,000 volumes. You measure archives in linear feet. Today there is 2700 linear feet of archival material consisting of over 6 million pages. It has rare first edition books and manuscripts. The collection contains phonograph records, musical scores, club cards, tee shirts, signs from protests – you name it and the archives has it. All of it is properly conserved in acid free boxes and paper. It is all on computer and accessible to the general public.

While I was with the archives, we had students write their theses on topics that we had primary source material on. One undergrad from Harvard came down for a week. We’ve had several national researchers tell us our Anita Bryant collection is the best in the nation. We even helped a detective working on a crime by going through our archives based on the date of a murder.

The library consistently obtains grants these days to help fund projects. It sends exhibits all over the country and for several years, its had a full time paid director, fund raiser, and museum/exhibits curator. In addition, it opened up exhibition space in Wilton Manors, the hub of the gay community in Broward.

I loved the time I spent working as a volunteer, less love on the time as president, but more love as Chief Archivist. However, it was taking a toll and I knew when to throw in the towel and sit back and watch it grow. I’m still a member to this day.

Stay tuned!

4 April 2021

OK, you may not wish to read this one. It gets very personal. It’s time to explore my gay life. Let’s start with sex.

Probably like most people in Mississippi, I learned about the birds and bees, not from my parents, but from scrawls on the walls of men’s bathrooms and overheard conversations in the hallways at school. Most of it was pretty stupid. I remember one kid who was our high school quarterback who distinguished himself by telling everyone you didn’t have to be smart to be quarterback – and he proceeded to prove it with a terrible won-loss record. A group of boys were sitting outside on the football field and he stated he needed some woman to piss in. I seriously think that’s what he thought sex was – a male urinating into the vagina of a female.

You would think most of these boys would know more, particularly since they were often from farms. However, not everyone seemed to get the message via animal action on the farm. One cousin, when he married, got ready for the wedding night. He later realized his new wife had never been instructed as to what to expect. She was clueless.

Then there was the case where members of the basketball team got caught having sex with with the principals cow. Apparently the cow had a bowel movement during one of the attempted copulations.

The first time I saw a condom (we called them rubbers) was in junior high when one of the older boys showed one around in his wallet. I suspect the thing had been in their for years because it looked pretty beat up.

My sexual education was pretty much from bathroom walls. At least it was illustrated. Mother and Dad never mentioned the subject so one day, just to be mean, I asked Mom to explain about birds and bees. She was taken aback. She thought I knew nothing. I painfully made her go through the entire explanation. At least I now knew the illustrations were pretty accurate.

My first sexual experiences were pretty much like any teenage boy – nocturnal emissions. That hadn’t been part of Mom’s explanation and guys didn’t talk about them so it was new territory for me. Certainly pleasurable territory but mysterious all the same. Then came the realization you didn’t have to wait for nocturnal emissions – you could masturbate. That bolt out of the blue really took off and is still fun and entertaining today. I always loved a comment in an old Playboy magazine. They did a sex survey of their readership and reported 98% of all males had masturbated at least once in their life – and the other 2% lied about it.

Other than dates with my right hand, I was totally inexperienced sexually all through high school and undergraduate college. I had inklings that I was attracted to boys in junior high and high school but had not even heard of the word homosexual or gay in junior high school. None of the sex-ed films we saw ever mentioned the terms either. However, it seemed a lot of the students at high school certainly knew I was gay before I even knew it was a word.

I never really got into sports. I was, however, a killer at jacks. I could pretty much beat any girl in school except for Carol Cooper. I suppose that was a pretty good indication I was different. It was brought home in a very cruel way one day when at recess the boys were to choose teams for some game. I don’t remember the game but I wasn’t chosen. Not only was I not chosen but I was told I wasn’t wanted. I burst into tears and ran to Mrs. Hearn. I’ll always love her for wrapping me in her arms and soothing me and getting me to quit crying. She charged over to the boys and asked why no one wanted me on their team. After kicking in the dirt a while, one of the teams said I could play on their side.

That episode pretty much sums up my junior high and high school years. I was socially shy, insecure in my abilities, unpopular, and dealing with alcoholic parents at home. Shyness and insecurity have followed me throughout my life. Neither my Dad or Mom were affectionate. I certainly, to this day, have issues with intimacy, I assume because of all of the above.

By the time I was a senior at Ole Miss, I certainly understood the term homosexual and gay and knew that I certainly was. However, I never acted on my sexuality in college nor in my four years in the Coast Guard other than stealing glances at gay magazines in bookstores. I always restricted myself to masturbation and anal play in private. I also had never kissed anyone in a sexual way. That ended in graduate school at Ole Miss, however, not like most might imagine.

I was in the basement bathroom at the student union at Ole Miss sometime in 1974 or 1975 when in walks my old French teacher from undergraduate years. I always had my suspicions about him and we certainly made eye contact. We went upstairs for coffee and got to talking. He learned about my field work at Tishomingo and he said he would like to see the park. I invited him on my next field trip. One thing led to another and I had my first experience with oral sex. Later, when he found that was my first, he shook his head and told me he wished he had handled it a little differently but I certainly had no complaints.

We never really hooked up again in graduate school but he did introduce me to a friend of his. I hooked up with his friend twice and experienced anal intercourse. What was so funny at the time was I had a Siamese cat named Charlie. He was afraid of cats and I had to lock poor Charlie out of the bedroom.

Much, much later, while teaching at IJC, I received an opportunity for a Mellon summer fellowship in Nashville dealing with new advances in biology. I had a dorm room at Vanderbilt and thoroughly enjoyed it. However, my libido was in overdrive and I actually drove around Nashville and picked up a hustler (next to the Grand Ole Opry house) and took him back to the dorm for oral sex. I was so weirded out I left the program early and made sure I had my doctor in Fulton give me a penicillin shot. Of course, I had to explain why but he didn’t bat an eye and simply loaded up the syringe.

I also tied up once more with my old French teacher on a trip back to Oxford. We went for Chinese and had oral sex back at my motel. I don’t remember why I was in Oxford but I called him out of the blue. When I told him who was calling (back before caller ID) he repeated my name, excited. He had a wife and two kids at the time. The kids got excited because they though I was another Fred. The other Fred turned out to be his old lover from UNC Chapel Hill. It was a case of mistaken Freds.

Just before I left IJC, I had started traveling to Birmingham to visit my first gay bars. There were two that I would go to but didn’t do anything sexually at any of them. Then when spring break came, I decided to get into my truck and drive – somewhere, anywhere. I ended up in Key West and stayed at a gay guest house and went to the famous Copa gay night club. The massive dance floor was packed with absolutely beautiful men dancing their asses off. I got “gay overload” and had to leave. I did experience my very first visit to the baths. Key West, at the time, had several gay bath houses where the order of the day was anything but cleanliness. This was a very nice bath house (since out of business) but I was too paralyzed with fear to do anything other than take a shower.

After I moved to Jackson for graduate school at the medical center, I lived at Jacks and Jills, the oldest gay bar in the state. The only sexual experience I had was with a guy by the name of Butch at Archie’s cabin (we met at Jacks). Archie was nice enough not to disturb us. It was Butch who took me to my first opera. He wasn’t one to settle into any kind of relationship so it pretty much was a one and done thing.

I didn’t do anything sexually while in San Antonio other than going to gay bars. It was the same with my brief time in Atlanta with the exception of going to another bath house in Atlanta and actually participating for a change.

Once I got to Fort Lauderdale (actually Hollywood at Lincoln Chateau) my mentor for finding AIDS patients at Hollywood General asked me on a date. Later I invited him over for dinner one night and he showed up with flowers. You can’t not have sex when someone brings you flowers! Actually, as I wrote in a previous blog, it was just frottage.

Jump ahead several years and I would often spend a week or two in Key West during the summer (I taught first summer term and it was usually late July or early August in Key West). I always stayed at gay guest houses and hot tubs were usually very interesting. I remember one guy who was down for the weekend to meet his boy friend but wanted to have sex with me. We basically did mutual masturbation at the hot tub but then he wanted to have anal sex with me. All it took was one look at his penis to realize that wasn’t going to happen. It was huge.

At my favorite gay guest house in Key West, I had a favorite room. It was on second floor and at the top of the stairs. My window overlooked the condo next door. One day I was stunned to see a guy at the window of the condo looking at me while masturbating. It seemed that was his thing. Friends of mine would stay in the same room on my recommendation and they reported the same experience. It finally got so bad that the guest house had to police on him because he kept propositioning the guests.

My favorite story about the guest house (Curry House, not the historic one) was a professor from UF who had brought a favorite student down with him. The student was drop dead gorgeous. The manager of the guest house couldn’t put a complete sentence together when the guy walked into a room. He really was the most beautiful man I think any of us had ever seen. We also had the added benefit to get to see him swim naked in the pool.

Anyway, friendly me, I always spoke to him. One morning I came down for breakfast and find him all scratched to hell and back and bruises everywhere. I asked “Hard night?” He proceeded to tell me that he and the professor were drunk and they were on the balcony on the second floor (that faced Fleming Street) and the professor was performing oral sex on him. He got so excited he fell over the rail of the balcony onto the ground below. Fortunately/unfortunately for him, he landed in shrubs planted around the guest house. The alternative was a brick walkway.

To be honest, other than the one hot tub incident at Curry House, I’ve led a pretty chaste existence when I visit Key West. By the way, the Curry House is no longer a gay guest house.

In the 90’s I made it back to San Francisco for a National Education Association Convention. I was a delegate for UFF. As it so happened, the convention meeting was during the week of gay pride in San Francisco. I got to see my very first gay pride parade. It was great. Leading off the parade were “Dykes on Bykes.” They were mostly topless and there were quite a few that rode proudly showing their mastectomy scars.

The parade started at one end of Market Street near the Castro and marched down the entire length. Thousands lined the streets and the parade itself was probably a mile long. The highlight of the parade was a giant mannequin of J. Edgar Hoover in a polka dot dress. Rumor had it that he was once at a gay party and was dressed in drag in a polka dot dress.

The good news is that most impotency cases can be evaded just by making some common changes in lifestyle. cialis on line australia These natural ingredients work to increase the blood flow to the penis is either blocked or disrupted. discount viagra http://amerikabulteni.com/2012/01/16/wikipedia-go-dark-on-wednesday-to-protest-sopa-progress-in-congress/ Precisely, an increased level of stress and anxiety due to such negative image of the pill, the manufacturers of cialis tadalafil tablets decided to come up with herbal version. This means that you will need really good content alongside the cialis overnight shipping backlinks to rank better.

That trip to San Francisco reignited my love for the city and it was on this trip that I stopped in at the San Francisco Opera (at the War Memorial Building) and, on a whim, bought an opera ticket to see Verdi’s Rigoletto. I was hooked. While teaching at BCC, I started going to San Francisco Opera in the summer. SFO had summer series where you could see three or four operas in one week. I would stay a week, see three operas, and then fly back home.

The only place I would stay would be at the Parker Guest House, an old Victorian reconfigured as a bed and breakfast. It’s primarily a gay guest house but is very welcoming to straight couples.

Courtyard at Parker Guest House

OK, enough about the Parker House, back to sex. I would also go to a bath house not far from the Parker. It was called Eros and it was huge and took up two floors. You paid a fee to enter, grabbed a towel and got an eyeful. I was too chicken to do anything but masturbate to porn movies. However, the place was very clean and they provided condoms and lube everywhere.

On one trip out to San Francisco, a good friend, Tom, joined me and we toured the wine country and stayed at a nude resort near the Russian River. A bunch of us ended up in the hot tub on the first night. I ended up going to the cabin of a guy (Tom chastely went back to ours

shared cabin alone). The guy, again, was waiting on his boy friend to arrive and he wanted to release some sexual tension before the boy friend arrived the next day. The reason I bring this up was this guy was heavy into nipple play. He really liked his nipples tortured. I couldn’t twist, pinch or bite hard enough for him. It seems like every guy I’ve ever been with in California is heavy into that. With me, I can take it or leave it but I’ve decided it must be a western thing.

Back home, I started volunteering for Stonewall Library and Archives (now Stonewall National Museum and Archives). It was there I met Robert Nathans. To this day I think our benefactor, John Graves, hired Rob to help me out with the library. Somehow I ended up as President and we moved the entire library and archives twice during my presidency. I was at my wits end.

John introduced Rob to me when the library was at the old GLCC building on Oakland Park Blvd. Rob and I sat down and I asked him how he would like to help. He said marketing was his strength but he would help in any way possible. We went to lunch and he told me his life story. He had AIDS and a lover had just passed away and he needed something to occupy his life other than grief. He was a godsend.

When things really got bad – we had just moved from the fourth floor of the building to the third floor (several thousand books) and were scheduled to move to a new building entirely – Rob suggested a vacation in Key West. We stayed at the Equator Resort – another favorite place of mine – and unwound.

Cognizant of his diagnosis, I made the first move on Robert at the guest house. He said stop. I did. I made the second move and he said stop. I did. I didn’t make a third move. I think he was surprised. It really wouldn’t have worked out anyway since we were both bottoms in our preference for sexual position.

Rob and developed a deep friendship, going on trips, eating dinner together, etc. I described us as an old married couple in that we did everything together except the sex.

After we moved the library into the new building, a patron asked me out. I agreed and we went to a pool party. He said he had a surprise for me. The surprise was he was the entertainment at the party – in drag. That didn’t bother me. What was a little bothersome was he didn’t feel comfortable enough to tell me. In any case, we saw each other a couple of other times but only one oral sexual encounter resulted.

My old undergraduate French teacher got in touch with me. He called out of the blue with a question about a wild orchid found near Oxford a friend asked about. He said he knew who would know the answer – me. One thing led to another. He ran a garden store in Oxford after retiring and had to go on buying sprees for plants to South Florida. I invited him to stay and he came back a couple of times.

Once I took him to Key West (again at Curry House) and for the first time in my life I topped someone. The second time he came down from Oxford I took him to a gay club in Fort Lauderdale and he was willing for sex with me but it just didn’t work out.

Michel and Nancy have tried to introduce me to people. Michel did introduce me to John, now a good friend but we lost touch early on and then re-established contact. He’s the second person to bring me flowers. No, there was no sexual interaction.

So, now you know something about my sex life. People ask me why I haven’t found someone to live with or have a relationship. The closest I’ve come is with Rob but it wasn’t a sexual relationship. I still have deep seated intimacy issues, I’m still shy, and I’m still insecure. I avoid conflict because I had enough of that with the screaming of my parents and grandparents. To be honest, I’ve never had any good role models for relationships in my immediate family.

For a long time, AIDS was a constant in the back of my mind. To be honest, I would probably be dead from AIDS very early on if I didn’t have my social problems. I admit to having a high libido even at the age of 72. My right hand is still my best friend in life. I am alone but not necessarily lonely with all my friends around me.

Would I prefer to have a relationship, or in this day and age, a marriage? Yes, I would. I also realize that at this late stage it’ll never happen. Do I have regrets? Yes. Would I do things differently? Probably not because it just isn’t in my capabilities.

One thing that has been interesting to me about sex. I once considered going into business with a bartender at Jacks (we thought about opening a pizza place). We were always gossiping about other people at the bar and we got around to talking about sex. His idea was that he didn’t like vanilla sex. He started out with vanilla sex but as he grew and aged, he liked new challenges and new things and was willing to try out more and more.

I’ve noticed the same trend in myself. I think after a while you get bored and want something new. It’s like looking a porn. At first, it’s exciting but then it all gets so formulaic that it no longer interests you. Don’t get me wrong, I still watch and like porn but it has to be a certain type. We all have our own peculiar fetishes and kinks. Things we like and things we don’t.

I guess if I have a type, it is the edgy look on a guy, like he’s street tough. Why, I have no idea. I also seem to have a smoke fetish. I don’t smoke, I don’t like smokers, but for some reason I like photos of men who smoke. It could go back to the days when I was a kid and pictures of the Marlboro man. I do like anal stimulation, particularly when it involves the prostate. Why, again, I don’t know. Mother was a big believer in enemas when I was a kid. If I had a complain, out came the enema bag. Maybe that’s where that comes from.

So, if you were keeping score, I’ve performed oral sex on a person five times, I received oral sex from a person six times, I been the bottom for anal sex twice and I have topped once. By this, I guess you could consider me versatile although there are so few data points you can’t draw any statistical conclusions.

What it does tell me is that I grew up with a skewed view of sex – from my upbringing and from the repressed sexual attitudes of the town in which I grew up. The topic was addressed once in high school with a film. My parents never talked about it until I forced my Mom. I was led to believe the only kind of sex that was legitimate was as a married heterosexual couple. I stupidly believed what religion taught. I was certainly surprised when I went to Ole Miss and found out people thought of sex like eating popcorn. A significant number of married couples I have known either cheated or got cheated on by their spouse. I acknowledge I have hang ups about sex but at least I acknowledge them and am not hypocritical about them and can be open and honest about them.

Stay tuned!

3 April 2021

I moved to San Antonio to live with my cousin Jo in the summer of 1984. She had a two story house on Ridgewood Court. Upstairs there were two bedrooms and a single bath. Downstairs there was a living room, kitchen, dining room, and 1/2 bath – and a floor furnace!

I had no job but I did have some money left over from my GI bill’s last payment and a little left over from my graduate stipend. For the first week or so Jo showed me all her favorite haunts in San Antonio but I knew I needed to find a job pretty quickly.

One of Jo’s neighbors was a woman named Laurie. She claimed to be an interior designer. I’m not sure she was actually licensed but I have to admit she was very good at interior design. In conversation one day, she admitted she needed someone to keep her and her business organized. She operated the business out of her second floor apartment which also housed her teenaged daughter. What is it about mothers and daughters? They fought constantly. I agreed to run her office and get her organized. I figured who better than I – Mr. Anal. Boy was I wrong.

The statement about organizing the Democratic party is like herding cats applied to Laurie to the nth degree. She was in the habit of dropping everything and going shopping five times a day because she forgot to pick the other four things up each time. Finally, it became my job to be the gofer to keep her from running off every few minutes. I even became the chauffeur for the teenage daughter to and from school. All this was compounded by her affair with a local Catholic priest.

Even though I was living cheaply at Jo’s, I needed money and got work as a helper to a contractor. It was off and on work but it paid. I probably wasn’t too good but I actually had experience at that since I had worked construction right out of high school.

I got to know San Antonio quite well. The one thing I learned quickly was not to get anywhere near any roadway from 8-10 am or 5-6 pm. San Antonio had a way of stopping traffic dead on every roadway at rush hour. I loved the museums, the Japanese gardens, and, in particular, all the cultural events available. I think Jo and I attended every art opening in the city.

Jo was still working at Incarnate Word University and I often made it home before she did. I would clean house, cook dinner, and do anything I could to make her life a little easier – except I seemed to play too sad of songs on my stereo.

It wasn’t long before I realized I didn’t want to be a gofer or construction helper. San Antonio’s job market was not great. I decided to move to Atlanta and try my hand there. I had a friend from Jackson, Carl, who had transferred to Atlanta and he agreed to let me sleep on his couch until I could find something. I was there looking for a job when I got a call from Dad. A place I had applied for a teaching position called me for an interview. It was Broward Community College in Fort Lauderdale.

I drove from Atlanta down to Fort Lauderdale for my interview. I wasn’t sure where to go for the interview. There was the administration center in downtown Fort Lauderdale, the North Campus, the Central Campus, and the South Campus. I finally figured out the position was at the South Campus and that was where the interview was to be held.

I walked in for the interview with the faculty. I don’t remember who the third faculty member was but the other two were members of the department: Darla Culmer and Steve Davis. They asked a few perfunctory questions and then said “thank you.” I was stunned. I had traveled all that distance for a fifteen minute interview. I didn’t get up and leave. Instead I said I had a few questions for them. I proceeded to ask them a series of questions and I think it threw them off guard.

I next met with the department chair, Mike Kovacs, and the provost of the campus, Ann McGee. Again, the perfunctory line of questions. I immediately started asking them questions and asked Mike if I could see the science facilities, especially the laboratory facilities. The position was for someone to begin teaching botany and zoology on that campus. Mike agreed to show me around and we talked more as we toured.

Later, I was to find out I was just a courtesy interview. They had already decided who they wanted for the job and they were just dotting their “i’s” and crossing their “t’s” for legal purposes. It depends on who you asked. If you ask Darla and Steve, they would say Mike didn’t want to hire me but they did. If you ask Mike, he would say the faculty didn’t want me but he and Ann did. In reality, I don’t think either “wanted” to hire me but I simply did a better interview than the other candidate.

By the way, the other candidate had a meteoric rise after she was turned down for the position I got. She went to North Campus and became department head, then Dean of Academic Affairs and finally Provost of Central Campus. I tease her sometime that I was responsible for her successful career as an administrator.

Mike, Steve and Darla all became good friends. Soon we added another faculty member, Daryl Miller and to this day we are all still good friends. However, it took me a little while to adapt to south Florida living. I’ve lived in a lot of places but this place was the hardest to make friends.

I kept waiting for someone on the department to ask me over for a get together. Not a word. They all lived their separate lives and once their day was over at BCC, they left everything behind. Finally, I got tired of waiting and threw a party at my place and invited everyone including the lab staff (we didn’t have to prep our own labs). Everyone had a ball and we started to do that on a regular basis. I like to think I had a little to do with that.

When I moved down to take the position, I found a place called the Lincoln Chateau in Hollywood on Lincoln Street (the streets are named for Presidents). I took a year lease. It was OK at first but turned into a nightmare. My next door neighbor went berserk one night and shot up his car and claimed he had been attacked. My a/c didn’t work for almost 6 months in spite of constant complaining to the management. If you parked in anything other than your designated parking space you were towed.

Mike Kovacs, the department chair, had a new girlfriend and he needed to move out of his little garage apartment off Funston Street in Hollywood (Hollywood/Pembroke Pines was the location of South Campus). I was introduced to his landlady and moved in. This was where the first faculty parties were thrown. I had a kitchen, living room, a tomb of a shower, and a bedroom the size of a closet. The parties were great. We even had the police called in on us one time.

The one thing about the city of Hollywood is every segment of society hates the other segment. The Italians hated the French who hated the Germans who hated the Russians who hated everybody.

My landlady was an 80+ year old Italian woman with her 80+ Italian boyfriend. She constantly brought me over all kinds of Italian dishes but I finally got to throwing them in the garbage when a soup she brought over one day had a distinct soapy taste.

After she decided to go up on the rent, I moved to a place near Cordoba Road in Fort Lauderdale. I loved this place. It was another garage conversion and the rent was reasonable – for a while. The guy was a bachelor for the first year but then he married a woman with two kids: Amanda and Blake – no fooling – shades of Gunsmoke. She decided my rent was too cheap even though I was finishing the interior and making repairs at no cost to them – I guess I did too good of a job – and she raised the rent.

Anyway, when she raised the rent – exobitantly – I moved into a friends condo in Fort Lauderdale and stayed there for about three years. A good friend, Judith Reiss, insisted I start looking to buy with my GI Bill and that’s when I moved to my current place. I’ve been here 27 years.

The college campus was relatively new. When South Campus was first established, it had been in a Presbyterian Church on Federal Highway in downtown Hollywood. While the new campus was built, they also operated out of a shopping center across the street from its current location. Finally, three new buildings were constructed and the science labs were in building 70, along with my office.

Erectile Dysfunction or ED cases are becoming more frequent these days. generic levitra no prescription Young drivers and those who have never generic levitra uk More Discounts had their license before. I do cheap levitra canada not drink protein shakes or energy drinks. Your titles readily available would mesmerise viagra ordination unica-web.com an individual for utmost 36 hours which is more than enough.

Early in my tenure at South, Peggy Green from North and I attended a seminar to promote the Keys Marine Lab on Long Key. We both agreed it was a perfect place to bring students on field trips.

You had to get a species permit from the state. In all they years I took students down to the Keys, not once did a Game and Fish officer check my permit. Just a few steps away was a canal across the street that had a mangrove area. It was better diving than on the coral reefs.

There was better diversity in the mangroves and most of our specimens came from there. You did run the risk of nurse sharks but fortunately, they are very docile.

One year I was teaching a plant morphology course for Florida Atlantic University and took students to the Keys to collect marine algae. I needed a permit and applied to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. I got a phone call from the director – a good ole boy from the panhandle. We chatted a little about the permit request and it seemed there was no problem. Then he said “Pardon but could I ask a question?” I said sure. He said “What the hell is an algae?” I explained and he signed the permit and sent it to me in the mail.

The Keys Marine Lab was next door to one of the better restaurants in the Keys. It was called The Little Italy. I would eat all my meals there when students would use the kitchen at the lab. Sometimes, we would all meet up at Little Italy for the last night in the Keys.

Another place I took students on field trips was to Archbold Biological Station near Lake Placid, Florida.

The main attraction to Archbold were the native scrub jays. They mated for life and had extended families (kids and grandkids) within a territory. They had no fear of humans and you would often bend down to look at something on the ground and one would land on your shoulder. I would take raw peanuts (unsalted) with me and feed them for the students. Technically that was a no-no but everyone at the station did it.

I spent 29 years at the college. I also bought in 5 years of Mississippi retirement and 4 years of military so I, in effect, retired with over 34 years in the Florida retirement system (somehow they didn’t count all the years but accepted the money which was all I really needed – it boosted my retirement pay).

In that 29 years, I did establish the botany and zoology programs on South campus and then watched it disappear when the universities classified those courses as 300 level courses. I ended up teaching mostly majors biology for premedical, prepharmacy, predental and preveternary students.

There are several things I am proud of during my tenure at the college. I spent two years as Faculty Senate President and two years as UFF Chapter President. Those two years almost killed me and did cause me to have a nervous breakdown. I spent those two years visiting faculty and administrators on all four campuses on a weekly rotation. There was a time I knew every administrator and every faculty member at the college and most of the support personnel. This was with an enrollment of over 46,000 students so there were plenty of faculty and administrators and support personnel. The president of the college one time at a Faculty Senate meeting was answering a question about whether or not faculty would believe something I said and he said there was no question in his mind about my influence on the faculty. I later led a vote of no confidence in him.

A good friend and colleague, Steve Watnick, suggested to me it was time to bring before the board of trustees the idea of domestic partner benefits. I was reluctant because the board of trustees was appointed by a Republican governor. I had to take it to the Insurance Committee first and I pulled all the data together to show that offering domestic partner benefits did not cost the institution (or institutions) more money. The insurance agent for the college, Lloyd Rhodes, surprised me and supported my claim.

The real problem on the insurance committee was physical plant. They were mostly high school graduates and were probably very leery of domestic partnership because of the “gay” connotation. One guy was speaking against it when his buddy elbowed him in the meeting and told him to shut up, it meant his girlfriend could get on the college insurance policy. It passed unanimously in the Insurance Committee.

Amazingly, it passed the board of trustees and was enacted for the college. The Florida legislature tried to bully the college into nullifying the policy but to the college’s credit, they stood by the policy.

Another thing for which I’m proud is the Wall of Fame for the Science/Wellness Department on South. We had a lot of students go on with their education and become outstanding in their field. At the time, the college did not really trace former students. I spent a lot of time working up a list of former students who had done well in the post-BCC careers. I asked the other Science/Wellness faculty to do the same.

Once a year the Science/Wellness Department would welcome new science oriented students to campus and do faculty introductions, do icebreakers, etc. The book representatives would often provide us small gifts or donations through the bookstore for prizes. We would then introduce the Wall of Fame winner for the year. They would make a small speach and we’d take their photo and mount it in a frame and put their bio with it and put it on our “Wall” of Fame. It was quite impressive what some of our past students accomplished.

One got into Harvard in premed (he later changed to business), another got a PhD at Penn State in biochemistry (ahem!), another became a physicians assistant through the masters program at UF and became associated with a famous thoracic surgeon. Another got a free ride to the University of Miami medical school.

For years I had been trying to get the campus to put in a nature trail. Finally, Hank Martel, one of my department chairs over the years, got promoted to the dean of academic affairs on South and he found the funding for the signage.

During my last years at the college, I promoted the idea of Professor Emeritus. When a faculty member retired, the college didn’t keep up with them since the state paid their retirement. I learned quickly as union president that retired faculty were great to serve on college committees. It then hit me to have the college acknowledge their service through the emeritus concept. There was a great deal or resistance from the administration until the dean of academic affairs on North Campus supported it. Hettie Williams and I had a rough relationship when she was dean on my campus but she and I finally had a breakthrough. She supported the idea of Professor Emeritus and brought other administrators along with her.

As it passed the board, the idea was to issue an ID card, allow for access to the libraries of the college, reduced rates for functions at the college, ability to take one course per semester free of charge, a faculty parking decal for all campuses, and an office space reserved for emeriti.

Also before I left, I digitized the biology, botany, zoology, and anatomy and physiology slide collections and placed them on the web so students and faculty to access them any time and any place. The site has now been archived and they can still make use of those. I did the same with the herbarium I constructed.

I also made instructional videos on lab safety and the microscope. One problem we had was students missing the first lab where those were the main topics. Lab safety was critical and so was the microscope. The videos allowed the students to review the concepts and be ready for the second lab.

In addition to those videos, I put out additional videos on things like how to read a pipette, how to use a pH meter, how to dilute an acid, etc. I still get emails from some faculty thanking me for the videos and requests to use the slides and videos.

Finally, I was fortunate enough to be awarded the Endowed Teaching Chair twice. This was started by Will Holcombe during his presidency and continues to this day. Corporations, businesses, and individuals endowed the fund and a specific number are awarded each year. When it first started, the award was $7,500 to the faculty member and $5000 for equipment/program purchases. It’s since been reduced in amount but I was fortunate in the two years I was awarded it, I got the larger sum. It really helped out financially. I’m not sure it really meant I was a good teacher but I certainly worked hard for the college for 29 years.

Stay tuned!

2 April 2021

After meeting with the dean of academic affairs and reading the handwriting on the wall, I begin to look around for something new to do. The University of Mississippi Medical Center had a lab technican program. It looked interesting. For some reason, science labs and I always clicked. I decided I needed to check out the program.

For some reason, my phone call about the lab technician program got routed to the microbiology department to a Dr. William Clemm. After clearing up the misunderstanding he asked why I was interested in the program in the first place. I explained my love of everything laboratory. He asked “Why not come get a PhD in microbiolgoy from us?” I was stunned. I told him I didn’t think they would be interested in me. He suggested I fill out the paper work and submit my résumé. I did and I got a call from him later saying to come on down to Jackson. I was given a graduate stipend of $5000 a year and I still had money left on my G.I. Bill. It seemed a win-win situation.

It was reinforced that I needed to leave IJC when Dad got sick and was in the Veterans Administration hospital. I asked for leave from the IJC to go down and see about him. By the time I got there, he was back home. I found out the dean of academic affairs had called to make sure he was really ill. He thought I had lied to him about Dad’s illness. I packed up and headed to Brandon for a talk with my brother. He had a cabin on a piece of property out from Brandon and said I could stay there for graduate school at the medical center.

Previously, good friends from IJC had moved to Jackson and they took me around to the two local gay bars. One was called Emerald City and the other was Jacks and Jills. Emerald City had entertainment in the form of drag queens.

Jacks and Jills was one of the oldest gay establishments in the south. It was located on the west end of Capital Street and been in continuous business since World War I. The bar was divided into two parts – Jacks for guys and Jills for gals. In reality, everyone was welcome on either side. Between the two bars was a massive dance floor.

It was at Jacks and Jills one night with Steve and Bobby (friends I knew from IJC) when I ran into an old high school chum Mike. He and I were in the Boy Scouts together. Small world.

Slowly but surely I was introduced to the gay community of Jackson. I even had a gay doctor. Also, because I was at the Medical Center in Jackson, it was recommended I get the hepatitis B vaccine. It was the gay doctor who administered the shots. Sadly, he was later found murdered in his home in Jackson.

One of the fraternity initiations that local colleges would do would be to drop someone off at the front door of Jacks and have them come in to get a beer to go. The front door at Jacks was so seldom used it always drew attention of the crowd if anyone walked in that route. This college dude would come in, walk up to the bar and it would slowly sink in to him that there were no females anywhere around. One guy was brave enough to ask “Is this a gay bar?” The response was pretty raucous and he ran out pretty quickly.

I knew I would be hanging out there on my free time and I knew Archie got around enough in Jackson and knew enough people he would eventually get wind of me at gay bars. I asked him to meet me at the cabin he’d offered me and we sat outside in the swing and I told him I was gay. He took it pretty well and said no matter what, he loved me. Thus begin a PhD program at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. The drive from a rural area near Brandon to the medical center didn’t take too long. I always parked in the Mississippi Memorial Stadium parking lot across from the medical center. The department was located on, I think, the third floor.

The microbiology department was undergoing a shift to new blood. Dr. Clemm was from the University of Florida and had become chair. He brought two youngish PhD’s with him. To get him, the university had to significantly expand the budget of the department and agree to increase graduate school enrollment. I think at the time, Clemm was getting paid more than the governor of Mississippi. I, along with 4 others were given a while to settle in but we had to pick an advisor pretty quickly. I’ll be honest and say I probably made a bad choice. The guy I chose spoke very softly (too softly) and seemed easy going but I was later to find out he was wound pretty tightly. His interest was fish immunoglobulins. By studying the immune system of fish he hoped to translate that to the immune system of humans. This was in the early 1980’s and there was still a lot of confusion about the human immune system and a lot of the particulars were just being worked out – things like the compliment cascade, killer T-cells, etc.

One of the things we would do would be to travel to the Mississippi Delta and collect live catfish and bleed them through the caudal artery for their blood. Once back at the lab, we would spin it down and try to culture the white blood cells. Once enough were grown, then we would do cell counts through a very expensive cell counter and try to determine the type of white blood cells found in fish.

We also raised catfish in the basement of the medical center. We had huge plastic fish tanks and I would have to periodically climb up on them and net catfish and bleed them and put them back in the tanks. I slipped and fell more than once but it never did knock any sense into me.

All graduate students also had to take a veterinary science course where we had to operate on a cat and a dog – common research animals. The Medical Center had been the center of a controversy on how they did or did not humanely treat their research animals and having all grad students take the course was their way of insuring safe and humane treatment. We had to remove the spleen of one dog. The team I was on had a guy that was a little loose and apparently nicked an artery. The dog almost didn’t make it. The instructor had to go back in operate again. He did make it.

We had to scrub and dress like surgeons with the whole nine yards of gowns, masks, and gloves. It was a great learning experience.

Since we were also taking classes with the med students, we had to participate in their POPS exercises – I forget the acronym but it had something to do with proper diagnoses and treatments. In one of the exercises we had to draw blood from each other. The instructor gave very brief instructions and turned us loose. The guy who did me did well but when I drew blood from him, he pulled away from the needle and I ended up giving him a hematoma. He turned very ashen and was very shaky for a while but recovered OK. By the way, what we wanted to blood sample for was to test for syphilis. Fortunately, I was clear.

Interestingly, in the department was one of Crag Knox’s old girlfriends. She was working on a PhD under the resident virologist. We always had to wear dosimeters in the department as standard gear because we were constantly dealing with radioactive isotopes. Of course, we always went way over the count. She had a way of dealing with the over count. She would simply lock it up in a drawer in her office for a week before it got read. Otherwise, she would have been forced to take a week away from her research.

You would be able to attain the strong and hard erections. viagra canada pharmacy It is also suggested http://amerikabulteni.com/author/cemogabriela/page/371/ buy viagra in canada to stop smoking. Most probably it damage to nerves, arteries, cheap levitra india smooth muscles and fibrous tissues. c. However, there is no need to viagra fast get panicky; a natural cure for erectile dysfunction is here to help you.

One day, I had to work with the radioactive isotopes and check my cultured catfish cells for any radioactivity. It was an automated machine much like a wheel. Someone had just used it and I was next in line. I got my readings and left for the day. My advisor comes in the next morning all hot and steaming and screaming at me that I had contaminated the machine. I really don’t think I did but since I was the last logged, I was the first blamed. He was really upset because he thought it reflected poorly on him. He shouted I needed to immediately go decontaminate the machine. I finally looked him in the eye and said very calmly, I’m going to go get a cup of coffee and when you calm down, come see me and let’s go over how you want me to decontaminate it. To this day, I don’t think it was me that contaminated the machine. There was a chemical that supposedly absorbed the radioactive isotope.

As mentioned before, as graduate students we had to take some classes with the medical students. One was biochemistry. I had a biochemistry course at Ole Miss which was a terrible experience. It was a weed course for premed students at Ole Miss and the test questions were all multiple choice. All five answers varied only in one word. In other words, you didn’t need to learn the material, you needed to memorize your notes word for word from the professor’s mouth. It was my worst college course up until I took biochemistry at the Medical Center.

The biochemistry course was team taught. It was divided into five or six sections and a different professor would lecture over their speciality. Fortunately, the grad students had available to us the note taking system of the medical students. For a fee, we were provided printed notes from the lectures. Of course, we all were required to do our time taking notes ourselves.

When it came time for me to take notes, I was given the recorder. I taped the lecture, took notes during the lecture and then played the tape back and corrected my notes and added things I missed. It took me a couple of days. The lecturer was a dietician who was new to the university and it was her first lecture to the medical students. I knew something was wrong when I got a note to go see the her.

She immediately told me that she didn’t say anything like what I had presented for photocopy. I was stunned. It was pretty much verbatim without any editorial comments. She insisted I correct the notes. I refused.

I was then called into the anatomy lab to meet with the note taking coordinator. He happened to be the anatomy lab assistant. He again demanded I correct the notes. I again refused. I asked to have the tape of the notes so I could compare it again to the notes I printed. He said (two days after the day I took the notes) that it had been erased. He explained that I would no longer be able to receive the notes and I was barred from any note taking copies.

My suspicion was she made some errors during her lecture and she realized it or someone pointed it out to her and instead of issuing a correction, she blamed the note taker. In any case, it saved me some money. All my grad student buddies allowed me to photocopy their notes.

I didn’t think anything would turn me off to biochemistry but the one course at Oxford and the team taught course in Jackson almost did. Once I got back into teaching, I rediscovered my love of biochemistry. I finally eked out a B in the course. Other courses I took were medical microbiology, introduction to animal medicine, microbial physiology and, of course, seminars. I only needed one more course to finish my academic coursework.

Very early, we were asked to present a seminar to the department. I had to choose a scientific paper with the approval of my advisor and present the research. I opted to go with his first recommendation. I had it down pat. I was also not adverse to public speaking since I had taught the last five years at IJC. I was just waiting for the knives to come out from department factions and was not disappointed. Fortunately, they were not aimed at me. One of the professors asked me a question and I honestly replied I didn’t know the answer because that was not addressed in the original article. Another professor suggested a solution and another challenged the first professor – and they were off. I only got about 1/2 of the way through my presentation before the place erupted in debate among the professors. Later, all the biggies in the department complimented me on my presentation. What presentation? I was interrupted midway and never got a chance to say anything else!

About midway in my first semester, Archie began to have business problems and marital problems. It got to be real difficult for him and as a consequence, it fed over onto me. I decided the best thing I could do would be to give him some space so he didn’t have to worry about me. I found a room on State Street near Millsaps and the Medical Center. I was close enough I could walk to the Medical Center – and pass Bailey Junior High School every day (just the memories I wanted to re-live. It was a great apartment and it even had a “roof” terrace. Actually, you had to climb through the kitchen window and the terrace was simply the flat roof of the room below me. However, I kept a couple of deck chairs out there and a table.

Some of the graduate students and faculty were very social. I would invite them over to my apartment and we’d play Trivial Pursuit all night long and drink beer. I probably should have signed up with the professor that always showed up at these events, in retrospect.

Speaking of gay bars…. I had the conversation with Crag Knox. It didn’t seem to bother him and he admitted he and his current girl friend used to got to Jacks and Jills to dance. He was surprised he had not seen me in there. It really did have the best dance floor and music. Archie and Tanis used to go and dance the night away and Archie loved playing pool at Jacks.

I spent two semesters at the Medical Center and finished all my coursework except for one course. The rest of my course load would be research hours. It was at that point that I decided I didn’t want a career in research. I learned a tremendous amount and actually utilized a lot of it in my next teaching position but I didn’t want to spend three more years for the PhD and another two or three years getting a postdoc and then a second postdoc. For some reason, a PhD means original thinking. I didn’t categorize myself as an original thinker.

I made it around to the various faculty and notified them of my decision to leave. I think it hit Clemm pretty hard. I was pleased when Clemm and a couple of the other professors told me I would be welcome back into the program anytime. I even had one professor offer to take me as a student to get me away from my advisor. That left me feeling pretty good.

I kept up with most of the graduate students in the program for several years and I’m still in contact with one who eventually finished her PhD in virology.

So what to do next. I stopped my PhD program and had no job. On a phone call to my cousin Jo in San Antonio, she blurted out “Come live with me!” I love San Antonio – having spent some time there while in the Coast Guard. I agreed. I loaded up my truck and headed west.

Stay tuned!