Growing up with my Brother on a small ranch/farm chasing cattle and other types of livestock, as well as harvesting fruit and nuts in the orchards, and managing a large garden for vegetable sales in our country road-side stand…that was a difficult way to grow up, but it also gave us a lifetime of memories that I will never forget.
Since my parent’s land was located on the largest Indian Reservation in North Eastern Oklahoma, some of my high school friends were Native Americans of the Creek Nation. They were hard workers who hauled hay, harvested fruit and nuts, and built and repaired barbed-wire cattle fences for wages paid by my dad. And on the weekends we hunted, fished, and on a couple occasions, I watched them fearlessly dive underwater in a local river, holding their breath for over a minute, and “noodle” with bare hands to catch a huge catfish. Now that was crazy!
We often went swimming and fished in a deep spring-fed pond that never seemed to lose water in the hottest months, and was a beautiful oasis deep in the wild Ozark country. We camped on the pond’s bank that was surrounded by a forest full of wildlife that was not very quiet at night. Sometimes the hairs on the back of my neck would crawl when a very close pack of coyotes started “howling”, or an owl suddenly “hooted”, and along with the hundreds of frogs croaking their “mating songs” it was actually quite noisy at times.
I can still remember the cool fall weekend nights laying near the hot coals of the dying campfire and staring up at the millions of brilliant stars of the Milky Way, and occasionally we were awed to see shooting stars streak across the sky. As young teenagers, we had no idea the size of the meteorites, and we also wondered just how far away the sparkling stars were. And best of all, during the cool nights of the “harvest” full moon, we would just stare at the Moon, a huge majestic beauty as it slowly passed overhead through the branches of the oak trees.
Those were truly the years that first pushed my imagination to dream of being an astronaut in deep space.
Since high school I learned in college to program in numerous computer languages and operated an old IBM 370 mainframe. Later I begin work as a systems operations technology analyst on a Hewlett Packard HP3000 mini-frame. After numerous training certificates from HP, I became a database analyst and developed and managed a number of applications in an ongoing 20 year career.
As a senior analyst, I became very adept in analyzing cryptic business data and reporting it logically. As a bonus, I won several Fantasy Football League Championships, and some cool cash, by analyzing the stats of NFL players.
Later I jumped from the corporate world into the education world, where I had a couple different careers over 15 years as a technology administrator and a high school teacher. I certified with the Texas Education Agency and taught technology and agriculture science classes to hundreds of students. Some of my students went on to be veterinarians. Agriculture is where I started, so I really enjoyed working with the Ag students, especially those in the FFA.
Keeping our mind sharp and body fit should be a very high goal for all of us, and I accomplished that as an international youth soccer referee for 25 years. Running 10 miles a weekend during tournaments in the Texas summer heat was a challenge. The foreign coaches were always tough on American Refs, but all the players were great!
My father was a World War 2 vet who recently “passed”, and I have two wonderful sons with the oldest one a Captain in the United States Army.
My youngest son got me interested in the topics of this book with his constant interest in fossil hunting and dinosaur questions that caused me to investigate some geological data. But I have always had an interest in space travel as well as interest in ancient civilizations, including the Pyramids and Sphinx of Egypt, the Mayans, and other much older archaeological sites around the world.
Maybe someday we can “time travel” back to see if Atlantis really existed. With thousands of magazines and books in my library, “science and technology” are my favorite subjects.
On a final note, about 30 years ago, long before the Space Shuttle program was sadly canceled, I was on a special escorted tour of the Houston NASA facility. And while the “training astronauts” were on lunch break, I got lucky when the guide allowed a couple of us to climb up the outside ladder and through the crew hatch entry (side porthole) into the mid-deck of the shuttle, and then up a ladder through another hatch into the space shuttle flight-deck for this photo of me sitting in the pilot’s seat. It was a tight fit and I had to take off my cowboy boots. A totally unexpected and amazing experience!!
That wonderful moment in 1990 was as close as I came to being an astronaut.
