I grew up in a lower-middle class community on the South Side of Chicago, where the worst I faced was toughs who liked shaking you down for spare change in return for a safe walk home from school.  Having earned my money waking up at 5 am every morning to deliver papers, I didn’t want to comply and, at times, had to decide between fight or flight, depending on the situation. I have been a staunch anti-bullying supporter since, one of the reasons I moved here to raise my kids. 

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My parents gave me three sisters and a brother, but we also got together with many aunts, uncles and cousins, eventually overflowing my grandparents' small house, and needing an increasingly long table for feasting during holiday celebrations.  Politics were often discussed, and I can still recall hearing my father call Roosevelt demented for giving Poland to the Communists after WW2.  Of course, after studying that war, I’d have argued it was more a matter of circumstances than personality, but his perspective was fixed on what he saw it do to his relatives who had remained in Poland after my grandparents left.  While my family and relatives sometimes had diverse opinions on politics, we were still a small community where everyone helped each other out, not only in times of trouble, but whenever more hands or different skills would help get a job done, like repainting a house or building a granny-flat.

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After the paper route, my first jobs were:

---filing the charge card applications (a new thing then) at minimum wage (starting at $1.50 per hour)

---dumping sometimes really heavy garbage cans onto the back of a garbage truck for the City of Chicago at twice minimum wage.

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My first major life-decision was to join the U.S. Army without any prompting from friends or relatives.  Perhaps it was the odd war stories my relatives told, perhaps rumors that it was only a matter of time until the Selective Service drafted me, or perhaps my slim choice of reasonable employment.  However, since everyone told me I'd end up in Viet Nam, I like to think I joined simply because I was curious as to what was really happening in a war on the other side of the world.

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Going to Viet Nam was a life-changer, luckily not a life-ender for me.  I was one of the 25% of the arrivals chosen to go to an infantry unit in the field, where we tramped around the jungle in groups of five or more trying to confront an enemy we seldom saw.  Suffice to say, I saw a little of everything a person might see in combat, and that was enough.  The mini-series, The Pacific, most closely resembled those experiences, though luckily not to the extent faced by some of those brave fellows in WW2. I gave a talk about my Viet Nam experience to my stepdaughter’s high school history class, but how much can one convey in a quarter hour?

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After being medevac'd to Japan, then a military base near home, and given an honorable discharge with severance pay and a 10% disability, I spent a couple months with family and relatives to clear my head.  I thought I the world had changed, and it had, but not as much as I had.  Rather than bore you with dates and places, I’m going to fast-forward through the many places I lived, studied and worked, from Illinois to Massachusetts to Arizona to California to Hawaii to here in Oregon.  Each is a story unto itself, but it all can be reduced to saying, simply -- I explored this great country from coast to coast, fell in love, started a family, did it again acquiring more family, then came here.

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