There is more detail in each segment of my life but this chronological sketch of my life:
I was born in San Diego, California and stayed in the area until I was 5 when I got on a boat and went to Japan. The sailors on the ship told me I was eligible to get a tattoo since I had crossed the International Date Line but I decided to wait. While in Japan, I learned to speak Japanese and to play golf, among other things.
From there I moved to Baltimore where life was pretty ordinary for a couple of years. We lived close to the school so walking with friends and playing in the nearby forests plus, television for the first time made things normal.
In between many segments of my life, we stayed at a cabin in Rocky Mountain National Park. My father built the cabin before I was born on land homesteaded by his father before he (my father) was born.
Then, I found out that I would be moving to Austria. It confused me, it was another country but the people looked like us? And they spoke yet a different language?
Salzburg was my home for the next 4 years, it was incredible – my play area was a medieval castle when I wasn’t exploring bomb shelters or staying at a mountain lodge and skiing. We (Don, Chip, Sargent, and I) had a secret way into the castle through a tunnel on the backside of the hill it sat on. I went to school at what used to be one of Hitlers vacation retreats. I didn’t, but I could drink beer or wine and go in a bar by myself. I only went in to collect beer cards (we called them, they were coasters, I still have a lot of my collection).
From there we spent half a year at the cabin and school in Estes Park, Colorado before moving to Atlanta, GA on a military base called Fort Mac. We lived between the 3rd and 4th holes on the base 18 hole golf course. It was another fantastic place, in the last half of the 1950s, there was more going on than I realized. And then my Dad bought a farm, I got my first gun, and an old black man taught me to harness a mule to plow a field.
Then came military school, Georgia Military Academy – I was a bit of a free-form kid and the discipline of a military school was to help me. I think it did but mostly, I loved it even though I spent most of my free time marching alone with a 9.5 pound M-1 rifle on the “oval” to work off demerits for those times I resisted that discipline.
After about 3 years I was back in Baltimore, actually Dundalk then Glen Burnie, if you know the area. I was at Fort Holabird every school day and met my Dad’s colleagues, who were Army but seldom wore uniforms. This is where High School started, kind of uneventful as my life had gone except that I became a serious Boy Scout and had a couple of great friends.
The next change was probably the biggest of my life. I moved to Colorado and became a cowboy. First I moved to stay with my uncle who had a farm in Colorado, in order to learn things I’d need to know – mainly to drive (he sat me in a WW2 vintage jeep, showed me the gears, demonstrated the break and gas petals, and turned me lose on country roads) and how to build and fix fence. I can also shovel manure and castrate pigs though I don’t ever need to do either of those again. Finally the change came when we moved to our ranch, 3,000 acres of hills, canyons, and forests in the foothill mountains of northern Colorado. As cowboy standards go, I wasn’t very impressive but I could rope cattle (once roped a full grown bull from a horse and subdued him so that he could be led gently into the horse trailer, it was more comedic than heroic but it still counts), I was bitten by a rattlesnake, became skilled with a chainsaw and ax, fixed miles of fence, and could break and train a horse.