CHAPTER II :
BEFORE THE BEGINNING
My Dear Kids, 
I realize that in important ways, you are neither “mine”, nor any longer kids.  You are young adults rapidly assuming independence.  Two of you are the offspring of a natural father whom I knew only briefly in the flesh, though I sometimes believe his quiet ghost has taught me a few things about you since.  You have Jacques' inheritance in your bones and to a degree, in your outlooks.  That is as it should be.  You are quality people and I frequently appreciate the part your father played in the beginnings of your unfoldment.  

A third young person is closer to me in blood than you are, Kate and Matt.  But Caroline knows another man as her father.  We'll speak of her a little later, and she too will hopefully receive here, some message that is specially directed toward her life and needs.  

For all the fact that you are not in quite the usual sense my family, I've been terribly pleased for us to have the opportunity to "borrow" each other from time to time.  As we have grown accustomed to each other, you've become just a little aware of the family from which I sprang.  Distance and circumstance have limited your chance to know my relatives very well, despite their interest in you.  Notwithstanding the distances, I want to share these people with you, and through them, to share some ideas about my own life.  

It's been fifteen years since you first met my family, at the party the night before your Mom and I got married.  That evening was quite an experience.  My four living brothers and their wives are a totally mixed bag, aren't they? Possibly no less so than your great aunt who brought the forty pounds of potato salad. or the other lady who showed up in the black leather pants suit.  For that matter, there's Crazy Emma ...  your former neighbor who always seems to know the latest events (not to say "gossip") in every house on the block.  I continue to drown in the names Erna and others in the family try to share with me, whenever your Mom and I visit.  I know you have been equally puzzled by my mother's recitals of her list of second cousins, once-removed.  To really get to know my family, you'd have to spend weeks.  I swear my mother used to keep track of every living branch of the tree...  and most of the dead ones, too.  Now that Mom is dead, that task has fallen to one of my older brothers -- though he does it very differently than Mom did.  

A dry recitation of the Lawrence "begat's is not quite what I had in mind, here.  The people I most want you to know about are a little closer to me, and perhaps also to you.  If I may be permitted to go just a little weird on you, I'd like to introduce you to some of the relatives I carry around in my head and hands: Kay and Matt, meet "White Feather", your great-great-grandma by marriage.  And oh, yes, that fellow over there in the corner with the corn cob pipe and the Army artilleryman’s hat is your grandfather Brad, as he appeared about 60 years ago...  

I think sometimes, that a person is the sum total of everything he or she has ever experienced, and that his or her forebears have experienced.  The prehistory before birth lives on in each of us, attenuated by the borders of birth and death between the generations.  There are days when I can feel the spirits of my distant Sioux great grandfathers looking out through my eyes into the modern world.  There are also days when an old scar on the fingers of my left hand throbs, and I can sense layered over my skin, the toughened hide of my father's father who was a cabinet maker, and of his father in turn, who was a millwright.  From the other side of the family, my mother used to say that she occasionally glimpsed in my posture and footsteps, the passage of her own father, rather than her son.  White Feather spoke in Mother's dreams, as she still does occasionally in mine.  All of these people are in some measure, parts of me.  All are members of my family -- and now, of your family.  

One note of caution is appropriate as we begin this journey of introduction.  Some of the people you will meet here are still living.  Inevitably over a period of years, I've seen both their strong and weak sides; the proud and the merely vain.  Wanting to give you a moderately accurate picture of them, I have chosen to include memories and insights that are not always flattering.  Remember, please, that we all change as we grow older.  Though I do not always approve or agree with the actions of some of my forebears, I've developed a healthy respect for their survival traits.  They are a proud and stubborn lot.  They rarely give quarter in their battles with life and adversity, and expect none.  Thus I suggest that you use some tact, should you request them to retell the story that follows, from their own point of view.  

*** *** ***
A century really isn't a long time, when you think about it.  Significant numbers of people now live that long, and remember much of their early lives.  The changes that such centenarians have endured, however, are almost so large as to escape understanding.  There are only five generations in my family since some of us lived in a Native American culture that anthropologists would consider "pre-historic".  In the 1830's, my great-great-grandmother and her brother were the only survivors of a US cavalry raid into what was then considered "the West", along the Ohio River.  When she was old, this Sioux lady spoke to my mother about villages that once lined the river valley where she grew up, densely enough to create a haze of wood smoke that could be seen for miles.  She spoke also of traveling even further west, as the adopted daughter of a cavalry surgeon who had ridden in the raid that killed her parents.  She remembered miles of flat grassland, seen from the bench of an ox-drawn wagon.  

The world of the American Indian was different not only in detail from the world we experience today, but perhaps also in the basic perceptions through which Indians experienced reality.  The Indian world was a place where spirits moved and breathed in the rocks and trees.  Theirs was a culture in which some kinds of healing were sought through chants sung by the community, as a shaman filled a Hogan with the scents of aromatic herbs to make friendly spirits feel at home.  It is from such a world that an old Sioux and his strange healer-woman squaw sometimes stare out of my eyes, silently watching a machine age.  

What we now consider "the simple life" was not restricted to the Indian branch of my family or to the period of 150 years ago.  Until a few years ago, I had distant cousins who considered electric lighting a necessary nuisance, inferior to coal oil (kerosene) lamps.  The nuisance had to be endured because state laws forbade the sale of non-Pasteurized milk, so their cow barn had to be electrified.  

These people are old now.  They still farm river bottom lands, and they still welcome a brief spring flood with the loam it deposits on their fields.  Though they use tractors, a few of them still light their outbuildings with kerosene lamps.  When a tractor breaks down, they still know how to hitch up a team of mules.  They are the last of a kind.  When they die, they will probably not be replaced.  The wires that brought milking machines and a television box, also brought in a road, down which their children or grandchildren drove their pickup trucks and moved into town.  Some of the kids will eventually come back.  But when they do, they are likely to bring with them industrialized dairy barns and 2000-acre farm cooperatives.  The team-drawn plow will likely never return.  

Most of my family comes from the American Southeast: Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Mississippi, and Missouri.  The family derives from English and German/French immigrants of the early 1700s.  They were and mostly still are small farmers, trades people and merchants.  My branch of the family seems to have bred true to that tradition.  My cousins made money in land and banking, but they basically remained small trades people and craftsmen.  Even as an engineer, I am often intuitively closer to my tool box than to my computer terminal.  Though two of my brothers are technically trained, they are more tinkers than technologists.  We seem to fit a mold with which our grandfather would not have been too uncomfortable.  

My maternal grandfather -- or "Gramps" as he was mostly known when I was a small boy -- was born in Georgia in the late 1880's.  Most of his life story for a span of 83 years, I learned through my mother.  He was not a particularly talkative or introspective person.  

I remember Gramps as a very slim, thinly white-haired old man who rarely put in his teeth and usually had a chaw of tobacco stuffed in his jowl.  He would, as he put it, "take a mind to drop in" every month or so.  He walked (and this, in his late 70's) three miles across town, usually arriving promptly at the dinner hour.  Though my mother groused over his uninvited participation in our sometimes limited supper, he was welcomed.  His tobacco cans weren't, but he brought them anyway.  

After dinner, he sat with us and watched an hour of television, shaking his head over the silliness he saw.  He also went to visit my Uncle Spencer and his family, a few blocks away, probably a good deal more often than he was with us.  My uncle was comfortable for Gramps to be around.  Spence was the easy-going son, whereas my mother was the ambitious daughter.  There was something in Gramps' psychology that made an assertive woman a person with whom it was hard to break bread or pass the time of day.  

 In a Southern-Fried-Chicken way, Gramps was English.  Even after twenty years in California, you could hear a strain of the Georgia hills in his speech.  With his southern twang, came a certain stubborn pride frequently associated with the class of poor English-American immigrants and their offspring who continue to farm large areas of the American South.  It was a variety of pride that led Gramps into frequent and lasting pain during much of his life.  

Gramps was born Richard Easton.  He grew up largely on his own, having run away at the age of ten or twelve from a home and a stepfather he hated.  Perhaps he was large for his age, or perhaps it was slightly more common in the 1890's for a youngster to be forced to make his own way in the world.  In either event, he survived and eventually found his way to a lumber camp in the Georgia hills.  He was put to work at the mill trace, stripping the bark from logs that barreled down the sluice from slopes above.  

Unlike a few youngsters whom he knew only briefly, Richard was able to learn the use of the long-poled bark knives before such tools or the treacherous footing around the mill trace killed or injured him.  He was one of the smallest in the camp, becoming unofficial mascot at tables surrounded by tired lumber jacks.  Like them, he fell into a rough bed on a straw-filled pallet, after twelve to fourteen hours of labor, six days a week.  This routine put muscles on a frame that grew longer every week.  

The young man was fifteen before he again saw his mother and stepfather.  Though I have never heard the story in detail, it seems that their reunion lasted only a few months before he was again on the road.  This journey took him onto the rails.  He became a general teamster, roustabout, lineman, and boiler mechanic on the railroads.  At one time, he was briefly a train conductor.  If faded pictures do him any justice, he became a rather dashing young man.  As he posed before a faded backdrop, the Indians in his ancestry showed strongly in his dark eyes and hair.  

Early in his twenties, Richard met Hattie Stone.  She was a tiny woman, a little over five feet in height and two years older than he.  The couple may have seemed an odd combination; he a tall, dark-haired Indian scout of a man, and she a schoolmarm nurse thought to be past her "prime".  She had finished high school in a large town, married, and gone on to complete nearly all of her medical school training.  Then her first husband died and she had a mental collapse six months before graduation.  When she met Richard Easton, Hattie was again studying medicine with her uncle, a doctor known across a large area of the State.  

Hattie displayed two major failings for the times in which she lived.  She was a little too intelligent, and her mother was a half-breed Indian.  Though Hattie had inherited good land and small wealth from both her father and first husband, she would never receive the full trust of some of the older people whom she nursed in the town where she grew up.  She would always be just a little suspect, if not notorious, so long as she remained a single woman living alone.  Yet, if she married, she would lose ownership of her land to the man whom she married.  That was the law at the time -- at least as my Mother remembered and described it.  

I imagine that Hattie married Richard hoping to find a way somehow to remain independent in spite of marriage.  However small her physical stature, she overshadowed Richard in many ways.  If she thought to control him, however, she had not reckoned with his pride.  

Early in her marriage, she attempted to comp1ete her medical studies with her Uncle.  This became impossible.  Such study required long hours, much of the time spent away from home.  Richard cajoled and then insisted that they sell the farm she had inherited from her first husband and move to another town.  Though Hattie and he fought, there were few forces on her side in the conflict.  Discovering that she was pregnant with their first child, she caved in to his demands.  Even had she left him, none would have dared to take her in.  Divorce was unthinkab1e and her inheritance -- for good or ill-- was permanently lost to Richard.  

The growing family moved quite a lot.  At first they lived near Hattie's relatives, farming and share-cropping.  Two more children were born.  Then Richard heard of highly paid work in the Texas oil fields.  They traveled west by train, and for four years he earned what he called good money, topping off wells and rigging towers.  Then he was disabled for several months by an unknown disease of his kidneys.  He lost nearly seventy pounds.  Finally, the family moved back to the south, away from the "alkali water" that he blamed for his illness.  They bought a large farm and for a time, thrived.  

In a relatively isolated area of northern Mississippi, Hattie again took up medical practice, this time as a midwife.  Even had she been inclined to remain strictly a farm wife, she and her neighbors were over seventy miles by carriage from the nearest hospital.  Her lack of license was of no concern to them, so long as she contacted her Uncle by telephone for advice on really complicated cases.  She rode through many storms in the family wagon, to stitch up a deep cut, set a broken leg, or deliver a baby.  Though Richard chafed when she was gone for more than a few hours, he also found pride in the fact that their family was becoming known all over the county.  In a minor way, they were becoming gentry.  

Family responsibilities increased.  Richard's mother came to live with them, caring for three growing youngsters in the house.  The old woman was nearly blind with cataracts, but still able to help Hattie -- and soon, Hattie's daughter Mavis -- in the many chores of a large farm.  In the harvest season, the two women and the little girl rose together at 4:00 o’clock in the morning to prepare a farm breakfast. At mid morning, they took a large supper to twelve field hands who joined Richard to gather the crops.  

Soon Richard saw another opportunity and bought more land adjacent to their farm.  He considered adding a tractor to the horses and mules in the barn.  He borrowed money to plant an enormous crop on all of the land he controlled.  Then a series of tragedies struck.  A bad harvest brought the default of his loans.  They sold their two hundred acres for a little less than nine hundred dollars, and moved to a smaller farm.  Spencer, never more than an indifferent student, refused to finish high school and went to work in the field full time.  Richard needed the help and did not complain, but Hattie fretted as she watched future opportunities for Spence dissipated by another bad harvest.

Hattie's middle son Jacob drowned.  For a time, the family also drowned in their grief, for Jake had been the favorite of almost all he met.  Within the year, Hattie had the first of several heart attacks.  As she lay in bed recovering, her daughter Mavis developed a high fever.  When the doctor arrived, the diagnosis was a new and terrible scourge: polio.  

For months, Mavis hovered between life and death, in coma or delirium.  When she regained consciousness, there were more months of slow recovery with the exercise therapy and hot mud baths prescribed by her Uncle.  For over a year, the girl could walk only in braces.  For several years thereafter, she would wear an inch-high lift under one heel to compensate for a short leg.  As Mavis lay in bed getting over the worst of the disease, her closest friend and confidant died: her grandmother's bad cold developed into pneumonia and killed the old woman in less than a week.  

Mavis regained a precarious health, only to accept the burden of holding a household together during the increasingly long periods when her mother was bed-ridden.  Hattie had repeated heart attacks.  Once, Hattie was more than two weeks in coma.  Her incontinence required Mavis to bathe her and change bed linen, twice daily.  Eventually, after years of deterioration, Hattie would die.  In the meantime, Mavis' life would be affected by other kinds of loss.
	As Hattie failed, Mavis found herself pulled between demands of family obligation and those of her own nature.  Though her polio had permanently interrupted her education, the movement of the family into town provided new associations.  She made friends that she would never have met on an isolated farm.  In her mid-teens, Mavis became a shy, rail-slim beauty on whom boys came to call.  She went to barn dances and an occasional movie.  She acquired a steady beau.  Shortly after her sixteenth birthday, during a brief remission in her mother's continuing health problems, Mavis married.  Her husband had much in common with her father.  He was a handsome young southern farmer, with very little money and no immediate prospects.  

The couple spent their wedding night in the home of her mother-in-law.  There, Mavis experienced a frightening introduction to adult womanhood.  She came to marriage totally lacking in the knowledge available to young people of a later generation.  She knew almost nothing of sex, save that it was expected of her and feared by most girls of her age.  Her lover was little better educated.  What he had intended as masterly love making, transpired as rude force.  The morning after their wedding night, Mavis' menstrual period began and quickly became a hemorrhage from internal bruising.  

A doctor was called to stop the bleeding.  Mavis endured an uncomfortable examination and an equally uncomfortable lecture by the physician, concerning the mysteries of marital happiness and the duties of a wife.  To Mavis' husband, the doctor was blunt: "young man, this is not a heifer in heat.  She's a female human critter, and a young lady with some long-term female problems.  It will be a few weeks before you can come into her bed again, and when you do, you're going to have to go slow and easy, damn it!  Here, I want you to read this..." A thin pamphlet was given in lieu of further uneasy discussion.  

This was not a reassuring way to begin married life.  The times themselves were even less secure.  In 1934, millions of Americans were out of work, Mavis's husband among them.  He spent long days riding between farms on a borrowed mule, asking for odd jobs.  Months later, he heard of work in a town across the state.  With little explanation other than that it was "necessary", he hurriedly packed his bags and left.  He returned home on weekends to join his wife at the table of his widowed mother.  

Mavis occupied long days as best she could, desperately hoping for the child her husband wanted, to bind together their increasingly shaky union.  A miscarriage left them both disappointed.  Soon, he moved further south to seek work in New Orleans.  He had little money for travel, he said, if he was to send anything home for his wife's support.  He was rarely home.  

A personal friend of the couple came to Mavis just after her first anniversary.  Though he hated to interfere between husband and wife, he felt she had a right to know that her husband was making a fool of himself down in New Orleans.  The man was out until all hours of the night drinking, when he wasn't shacked up with a notorious lady who happened to have off-color skin.  

Mavis was cut to the quick.  Within hours, she boarded a dusty bus on the way to New Orleans, the ticket purchased by an equally shocked mother about to disown her son.  With Mavis went another bequest from the older woman: a .44 caliber magnum revolver.  

Mavis arrived in New Orleans on a hot August evening, disheveled and crying.  Through her tears, she managed to find her way to the street address on her husband's letters.  It was not the boarding house which he had described.  She confronted instead a tiny, airless bungalow on the edges of a disreputable area of New Orleans.  Hers was one of the few white faces on the street, as the hour approached ten o'clock.  

Coming to the front porch of the bungalow, she found only a screen between herself and the interior.  What she saw there, she never cared to relate in later years.  Possibly she encountered her husband and his lady friend making love.  Perhaps they were only sitting in the parlor sipping a cold beer.  Whatever she saw was sufficient to bring the magnum out of her purse.  The resulting explosion sent a lead slug through the ceiling over her husband's head, and the gun spinning from her sprained fingers to the floor.  Years later, she remained uncertain whether she had intended to hit or miss them.  

Mavis returned to her parents' home.  Her mother was distracted and still depressed over the death of Mavis' brother Jake.  Richard was deeply outraged that Mavis would leave her husband, and even more outraged when she applied for a divorce, smearing the younger man's "good name".  Since Mavis was not yet of age, she was forced to ask for her father's permission to proceed with legal action.  For a year, he withheld is his consent.  Then he delayed at each step of the process.  

As she turned nineteen, Mavis found herself increasingly restricted to the narrow confines of their small house at the edge of town.  Her mother became desperately ill.  Her father needed Mavis ' help in caring for the failing woman.  .  However, his concern went much further: he threatened anyone who came to call on Mavis, refusing to allow her to leave.  

For a time, she was actually locked in her room whenever not under his supervision.  The old man feared "those young studs sniffin' around, tryin' to see what they can get..." If the observation had not been a bit apt, it might not have stung so much.  On one of her rare dates, Mavis had to fight off an over-amorous young man who loudly complained that as a divorced woman, she had nothing to lose any more.  .  .so why was she so stand-offish about climbing into the back seat of the Ford? 

Tensions built toward explosion.  During one of the rare times when Mavis was permitted to leave the house, she decided to walk a half mile down the road to visit a neighbor.  Finding Mavis gone, her father stormed after her, with a bull whip wrapped around one arm.  He stood in the neighbor's yard and bellowed for all to hear, that they should send the young people out to take their medicine.  He knew some young buck had arranged to meet her there.  The neighbors came to their porch to reassure him that she had only come to visit and that no one had joined her.  They were delighted to see her after so long a time.  Richard, however, threatened to whip the neighbor if Mavis did not instantly appear.  Mavis ran from the house in a furious rush, bound for home.  

When her father followed Mavis, he was met at his property line by his agitated son.  Mavis, Spence explained, was sitting on the front stoop with the shotgun across her lap.  The gun was loaded.  Maybe it would be a good time for his father to clean out the barn?

It was well after sunset before Richard returned to the house.  By that time, the gun was back over the mantle and Mavis was preparing a late supper.  As her father sat at table, he muttered his discontent with these young-un's who didn't know when their elders were acting in their best interests.  With a sharp look toward the fireplace and the mantle, Mavis ended the complaint: ''Not one more word, Poppa!" The remainder of dinner was silent and Mavis was never again locked in her room.  

Hattie at last died.  Again, the family went numb with grief.  Richard spent days drinking, that were needed behind the harvester.  Only through the charity of neighbors who came to pick their crop, were they saved from bankruptcy.  With the small returns from the crop and sale of the farm, Richard and his son and daughter drifted for almost two years, moving more than ten times.  Always, the farms became smaller. Richard earned a meager income by painting houses and doing odd jobs where they could be found. But it was not enough. 

Mavis's trials with her father continued after Hattie's passing. In her early 	twenties, Mavis began seeing a young man with whom she had once briefly believed she was in love. She encountered the full force of her father's disapproval. As an attraction formed, Richard raved over the presumed ulterior motives of this rival. The younger man had to be trying to get her inheritance. He was only interested in her for sex. He was too uppity for a good Southerner -- good grief, his family came from Maryland! 

Mavis decided to elope, in hopes of finding happiness with a man whom friends told her was good-hearted and loved her. Their happiness would last a little less than three weeks. 

Mavis' .father learned of her departure when he found her clothes missing.  After some hard talking with her second husband's relatives, he learned where they had gone to live. He came to their small rented house just before supper one evening.  Scared but determined, they welcomed him. They were happy, they said. Couldn't he please understand? Wouldn't he at least try to be happy for them? 

This could not be, he replied. Mavis was still married to her first husband. Richard's signature had been required for her final decree of divorce to go into effect. Hoping for reconciliation, he had never signed the document and it had lapsed. Mavis was a bigamist, and if she did not seek an immediate annulment, her father would file charges against them both. No amount of talking would change his mind. Their relationship was made in sin, and he would sooner send them to hell than let them continue in it. 

Mavis once again returned home, her husband withdrawing in the face of Richard's determination to bind her. An annulment was effected in a few weeks by a friendly judge who shook his head over Mavis' rebellion. For almost two years, she remained at home, working in a local boarding house. Little passed, between her and her father. 

Then one afternoon, a cousin dropped in. He and his wife were leaving for California the next day, and they had invited Spence to join them. It was 1940 and California promised work and a new life. Richard railed against his son's departure. The young man was needed to work their farm. His father would be destitute without him. Times still weren't good, even if the President had put a lot of people back to work in the CCC and TVA. The discussion lasted far into the night. Spence, always easily swayed by his father, backed out of the trip. The cousin turned to Mavis. Would she come in Spence's place? Mavis promised to think about the offer until the next morning. 

When Richard came to the breakfast table, he passed Mavis' packed bags in the living room. Little was said until she rose to clear away the dishes. Then he wept. If she left him, he would be all alone. Who would take care of the house? Why, she said, Spence's new wife could come in each afternoon, if he needed help. But who would take care of the chickens and yard stock? There was a neighbor boy who would think he was getting rich on a dime a day -- and even Richard could afford that. 

She turned from the half-washed dishes, picked up her bags, and walked out the door. A week later she would be looking for work and Richard would be working his way through a colossal drinking spree. It would not be a final parting, but it marked a major divide in Mavis's life. She was finally on her own and intended to remain so. 

During Mavis's first week in California, she met Brad, the man who would become her third husband. 

Like Mavis, Brad's roots carne from deep in the South. Unlike her, he had lived in California for several years. He had twice married there, known tragedy and loss there. Differently from hers, his life had been formed in the furnace. Brad descended from another family of tradesmen and crafts people. His grandfather had been a millwright, operating lumber mills in western Kentucky and southern Missouri. His father, John Lawrence, was a cabinet maker. His mother, Annie Lawrence, earned a consistent living during most of her life, as a dressmaker of high repute.  Annie carne from a good St. Louis family.  However, Brad's knowledge of his family stopped almost entirely in the generation before him. Though he searched diligently for deeper traces, few ever came to the surface. 

John was the youngest of three or four children spread out in age by thirty years and springing from at least two marriages. This produced a confusion of "once removed" cousins in the family and a few unanswered questions concerning who married whom. It seems possible that between his two "official" wives, my great grandfather may have made a home with an unofficial Cherokee squaw. This has been a matter of debate among my cousins. 

Grandfather John carne west from Kentucky to Missouri at a young age, after his father died. There was a dispute with his brothers concerning their joint inheritance. Learning that he stood little chance of getting anything of substance through his elder brothers, Lawrence moved on. He left behind him something of a reputation for wildness. With his departure, his line of the family was dropped from Bibles that recorded the marriages and offspring of the generations.

 John Lawrence seems to have been an able business person with a wide range of talents. He may also have had a streak of larceny in his soul that my father never told me about. By the time he was twenty-five, John had built sizable holdings outside East St. Louis. About that time, he met and married Annie. They first settled on a 160 acre farm near a small southern Missouri town. The property was given to them by Annie's relatives, and appears to have been in her family for many years. A cistern on the farm was said to have hid the family during a raid by carpet-baggers in the late 1860s. 

Lawrence added to buildings that had grown up on the place since the Civil War. He bought and operated a small mill and cabinet shop nearby. Later, they moved to another town where he operated a sheet metal shop and a small gas station. Shortly after the turn of the 20th Century, the Lawrence family had the first of their three sons. Brad, more than they might have guessed, was to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. 

Brad's early life was filled with Mark Twain country: the hills and hollows of southern Missouri. He learned, as most children did, to take care of farm animals and to harness a team of horses. It was said that he rode a western pony to Sunday school, a distance of eight miles and a weekly adventure for a youngster considered by some of his relatives to be a bit wild. 

On one occasion, .he returned home in the afternoon from the one-room school house he attended, to find that he must cross a creek flooded over its banks by recent heavy rains. Remembering a story related by his father, he slipped over the flanks of his horse, took hold of its tail, and swam the flood. He was soundly thrashed when he proudly related his application of this lesson. 

On another occasion, the frisky youngster found a large black snake crawling onto his Aunt's front porch. He quickly trapped the beast, picked it up by the head, and attempted to snap its back like a bull whip. Unfortunately, the snake's tail departed on the back swing, landing in Aunt Emma' s skirts : another incident to thicken the hide of this young adventurer. 

Grandfather John was willing to attempt almost any project, to better the lot of his family. When his asthma made farming an almost impossible misery, he turned to mechanics. He bought an early model Ford truck that the former owner had wrecked and given up trying to fix. To get the truck home, Lawrence found that he had to strip and reassemble the transmission on the spot of the sale. When the parts finally came together, darkness had fallen. Something was still ailing in the truck. It had to be driven several miles in reverse. 

Hoping to find a better life in the West, John Lawrence moved his family to Los Angeles. They had been in these new surroundings only a few weeks when his youngest son caught a bad cold and then died of pneumonia. In her grief, Annie grew so discontented with life in California that she demanded their return to the familiar country of Missouri. They traveled east as soon as Lawrence had saved enough money. 

Again, Lawrence set up a cabinet shop and a farm. Increasingly, the boys were called on to run the farm as Lawrence's asthma became worse. Finally, the head of the Lawrence household made a near fatal mistake that was to alter the direction of all their lives. As he walked into the bathroom one morning, Lawrence must have been unusually sleepy. He rummaged about the medicine closet, searching for the mouthwash that would chase out the cobwebs of a night spent sneezing and coughing. As he began to gargle, he choked on a sharp burning in his throat. He had swallowed and was breathing the fumes of a powerful cleaning solvent. As the fumes burned his lungs, he collapsed. 

When Grandfather Lawrence was taken to the hospital, the family was forced to take stern measures for its survival. Medical insurance was unknown. Like most other families, the Lawrences operated their business with little to spare and many obligations to the banks. To keep the family business running, Brad dropped out of school in the fifth grade. While his mother watched his younger brother and nursed the desperately ill Lawrence, Brad drove the mill wagon for his father. Brad celebrated his 13th birthday behind a team of four horses, delivering cabinets to his father's customers. He represented his father to the three workmen who ran the mill. 

The family struggled to pay off its business debts, but the volume of new business gradually tapered off. Customers did not quite trust the dependability of the shop foreman who spoke for the Lawrence mill. In a year, the business failed. 

The doctors who came to visit the older Lawrence eventually decided that there was little more they could do for him. Burns in his lungs had impaired his breathing and caused a fluid accumulation they called "pleurisy". Though he refused to die, they were convinced he would never work again. They recommended a cure that was in fashion at the time: he should be sent to the clear air of the American Southwest, where the fluid in his lungs might dissipate. It may have been only incidental that their failure to help the ailing craftsman would move across the country with him, safely away from the eyes of local customers. 

With the proceeds of the sale of their failed mill, the family packed its belongings and boarded a train. Days later, they disembarked on the dusty platform of a station in the small town of Gallup, New Mexico, at 6000 feet in the southern Rockies. It was 1916. As the family caught its breath in a hotel room overlooking the main street, they were startled by the gunfire of local farm hands and cowboys riding their horses into town for a bit of fun on Saturday night. An occasional shot into the air, a water trough or roof was generally ignored as long as nobody was hurt. The Lawrences had arrived in the "wild West". 

As it settled into its new surroundings, the Lawrence family moved into a house on the outskirts of Gallup. John was still ailing. Annie took in laundry and developed a small following as a seamstress. Her boys did any odd job that came to hand. Brad drove freight wagons, cleaned stables, and possibly cleaned up after drunks from the local saloons. His brother Timothy apprenticed at barely 12 years of age to a local printer. Tim was to make his life's vocation in this trade. 

By some miracle unknown to the doctors who had sent the Lawrences west, the fluids in the senior Lawrence's lungs began to subside. He got up and moved about more often. Though still unable to do heavy work, he found a market for another set of skills learned from his father: cabinet making. At first for periods of a few hours, and then on a steady basis, Lawrence began making furniture. As his health improved further, he bought, fixed, and then drove an old taxi cab for local fares. 

As John regained his health and resumed the leadership of his household, his eldest son became increasingly rebellious. Brad had been forced by events to assume guardianship at a young age, and was not inclined to become a boy again. Adding to the family’s unease was the fact that at age 15, Brad was a darkly handsome youth who seemed destined to cut a swath of minor or major heartbreak through the entire female population of Gallup NM. Though in later years Brad rarely spoke of this period of his life, it seems likely to have been a stormy one. More than one of the town fathers may have wished that Brad would pick another town to terrorize. 

Late in the First World War, events combined to catapult the young man briefly into a small degree of glory and a tour of the Southwest, away from Gallup. When America entered the European conflict, disaffection for the war was widespread. A troop train passing through Arizona was attacked by a mob and derailed. In another quarter, several Americans were massacred in a border raid by a Mexican bandit known as Pancho Villa. To deal with these twin disorders, a tiny corps of experienced Army officers was sent to New Mexico to recruit and train a company of National Guard troops. After Villa was chased back into Mexico, the Guard continued to keep order in the wilder areas of the Southwest. 

Perhaps attracted by the sharp creases in the uniform of the artillery sergeant who came to town -- and perhaps given little choice by his father, Brad joined up. In a few days he was off to Roswell New Mexico for training. At barely 16, he joined the rag-tag crowd of young farm hands and over-age shop keepers who had missed their war but gone off to join the Army anyway. Brad would proudly relate stories of that period -- true and possibly untrue - for the rest of his life. 

Brad became a National Guard private in the horse artillery. His experience in handling wagons was quickly put to use. He learned immediately from the ringing in his ears, to step back from the muzzle blast of the 88 millimeter howitzers that the company fired for target practice. He learned to march -- badly -- and to respect the leadership of his non-commissioned officers. The company sergeant had landed with Teddy in Cuba and survived bullets and fever. Their Captain, the highest ranking officer most of the privates ever saw, had been wounded in both legs by shrapnel in France. Both men lived in the tents with them. Both were concerned with the stubborn unmilitary-ness of the rabble they had collected. 

The officers of the company had reason to be concerned. Only a few weeks into their training, they were unexpectedly called upon to put down a riot. Rumor had been flying that a group of anarchists was organizing a derailment, this time of an ammunition train scheduled to pass through Roswell.

The company was hastily assembled and rode their horses into town. They could hear the murmurs of a large crowd gathered in a meeting hall across from the train station. The Captain brought his men up from the rail tracks behind the station, out of sight of the stragglers who began to trickle out of the hall and onto the street. Surveying the situation, the Captain concluded that the crowd might be incited as much as dissuaded by a thin Line of scared privates between them and their goal. People might die unless something was done quickly to break up the crowd. 

The Captain ordered his men up onto the freight platform. His most experienced soldiers set up two machine gun positions at opposite ends of this raised area. The riflemen were grouped in two lines, one kneeling and one standing, between the two positions. The officer stepped forward as the sound of a distant train whistle drew the bulk of the crowd out of the hall and toward the station. 

At a word from their sergeant, bayonets were fixed. At another word, the crowd found itself staring down the barrels of two water-cooled .30 caliber machine guns, set to lay down a cross fire through the open plaza in front of the station. Calmly but unmistakably, the Captain's voice echoed from the buildings behind the crowd. He informed them that in about thirty seconds, anything that stuck up more than four feet from the street was going to have holes in it. The gunners were to start at eight feet and work down in short bursts. After the first shots, the leaders of the crowd found themselves the only ones still standing. As the train passed through minutes later, the engineer was greeted by a mass of faces staring upward from a congregation on its knees. The train departed without incident. Leaders of the mob went to jail. Some shame-faced store owners patched bullet holes in their adobe, and a much relieved company of farmers returned to training in the mountains around Roswell. 

Not long thereafter, Brad was posted into southeast New Mexico. In the wake of Villa's raids, there were enough incidents of robbery and destruction that ranchers continued to be up in arms. Thus, the horse artillery found itself chasing bandits and ghosts, as sweating troopers pushed their howitzers through gullies and over the passes of the Guadeloupe Mountains. Occasionally, the company would get close enough to disturb an armed opponent. It then found itself diving for cover when snipers opened fire from higher ground. During one of these encounters, Brad moved just a little too slowly. He was sent back to Gallup with his corporal's stripes and a lump of lead in one leg. He carried the fragment proudly for the next 65 years, though it has never been clear to me how many of Brad’s stories were historical versus embroidered. 

After a short convalescence in Gallup, Brad was placed on the inactive list and released to find work. His wildness had been tempered by a thin layer of military discipline, but he was still restless. For a time, he drove wagons and then a Model-T truck, hauling freight through the mountains of New Mexico. His cargoes frequently included dynamite for the mines operating in the mountains. The roads sometimes coincided with river beds subject to flash floods. 

Hearing of safer and less lonely work back in Roswell, Brad migrated. Within a few weeks, the young man had apprenticed himself to an embalmer. As in so many other jobs, he did a little of everything for the funeral parlor. He learned something about embalming, but also much of first aid. The Packard hearse that he drove was one of the few such vehicles in the area. It frequently doubled as an ambulance for the hospitals near Roswell. 

It is difficult to imagine Brad wearing a sober face and a black funeral arm band as he slowly ferried a procession to the graveyard. It is easier to visualize him hunched over the wheel of the long car, the accelerator pressed to the floor board, dodging wagons and lesser cars on a race across bad roads to a boating accident or mine cave-in. 

Brad took with him to Roswell, a prankish sense of humor and a continuing attraction to all things female. Both got him into more than his share of trouble. One of his practical jokes almost got him fired. The funeral parlor employed an older man whose drinking problems made him a frequent source of aggravation. Impatient with Sam's frequent lateness and absences, Brad told him one day that alcohol would almost surely be the death of him. The remark was ignored until a week later, when the funeral parlor was once again called to come pick up their drunk from the local police station. Brad and a friend drove over in the hearse. They gently slid the sleeping man into the un-padded wicker basket used to transport corpses, and drove off. 

When Sam awoke the next morning, he found himself in the basket. He raised the lid, to recognize the interior of the garage at the funeral home. He was waiting to be taken (so he thought) into the embalming theater. While making his exit, Sam tore the rear door off the hearse. It was said that for the rest of his life, he never touched a drop of anything stronger than tea. 

Now and then, Brad had a slightly macabre manner of mixing business and pleasure. There was an odd fascination for some of the girls of Roswell, concerning the attentions of one who attended the dead. Brad and a co-worker occasionally conducted strictly unauthorized midnight tours of the morgue in the funeral home. For the flighty misses who accompanied them, there was a delightful scariness in a forbidden experience. 

One night, however, something happened that was not on the regular tour. Very rarely, random convulsions might be seen to pass through a body lying on the cold tables of the morgue. On this particular tour, an arm of one of the corpses twitched and fell to one side. The passage of air through the vocal chords of the body produced a soft moan. This in itself would have been sufficiently horrifying. However, the cold hand of the corpse came to rest on the bared neck of a young woman who had dropped her purse and stooped to retrieve it from the floor. The girl went into hysterics and had to be carried from the scene. 

Brad did not long thereafter remain in Roswell. 

The building boom of southern California once more attracted the entire Lawrence family to Los Angeles. When they arrived, Brad found that the youth of the population had caused a minor depression in the undertaking business. However, there was plenty of work for carpenters and store keepers. In the early 1920s, cities were being built in Hollywood, Santa Monica, and Pasadena. Thus Brad picked up a hammer. He would earn his living in the building trades during the rest of his life. 

At the time when the Lawrences arrived in Los Angeles, Santa Monica Boulevard was a two-lane road connecting a small coastal community with the central town through six or seven miles of open fields. People were only beginning to flock to the sunny weather and rolling hills of the area. The fields gradually became block after block of small houses and bungalows.

 Brad lived at various boarding houses in the area. From his earnings, he was soon able to buy a car. He frequented the dance halls and clubs that grew up around the coastal resort hotels. In a pin-striped suit and dark tan, with dark hair and a quick smile, he was a dashing figure. Though he did not acknowledge the notion in later years, it may be suspected that there were a few fathers in Los Angeles also, who wished he would terrorize some other town. 

Brad may not have been a favorite of the parents of a dark-eyed beauty named Opal Tarrington. The Tarringtons were from a well established family in the Midwest. They were prosperous business people in the rough town that Los Angeles was at that time. Their youngest daughter was cut in the image of a Clara Bow, and imitated the flapper style. Possibly to show her parents that she was not among their possessions, and possibly because Brad was an appealing young man, she eagerly courted and then married him. The Tarringtons, if they disapproved, appear to have done so in silence. 

The young couple seems to have been happy. In a year, they had a child, Aaron. Peter and Douglas followed at intervals of less than two years. The growing family moved between various towns in California as Brad changed jobs. He worked in a shoe store, and for a time clerked in a hardware store. He managed a bakery. Then Opal became pregnant with their fourth child. The year was 1929, and the world was about to be turned on its head. 

Late one afternoon, Brad arrived home from work to find his wife lying on her side in the bedroom, bunched around her large belly and crying in pain. At some point during the afternoon, while playing with the boys, she had collided with the corner of a table, with significant force. Now she was having terrible cramps. Brad gathered her up and drove quickly to a hospital. 

Like many in the area, the facility was badly overcrowded. But the family had no money for the few private clinics within driving distance. They waited for hours in the emergency roam. After a short examination of Opal, a young doctor came out to see Brad. It was unclear just what might be wrong with her. It was possible that she might be in premature labor. She should be admitted overnight for observation. 

Brad was to go home and come back in the morning. Squeezing her hand, he watched as she was a given a pain killing shot and wheeled on a gurney into one of the halls of the hospital. It would be over eight hours before she was again examined. By that time, infection would set in from a rupture of her womb. She died within the week. 

Brad was given little time to grieve. Days after he walked with Opal's coffin to her modest grave, the decade of the great boom came to an end. Black Thursday sent financial institutions across the country into panic. In a few weeks, the bakery where Brad worked was closed by its creditors. Building construction ground to a halt. Brad's mother watched over his three sons as he walked from employment office to employment office. No work. He began staying away from home longer and longer, avoiding the landlord whom he owed so much rent. He began to drink, and the kitchen cupboards went bare. His middle son developed a case of Rickets -- a disease of malnutrition. The family was in serious danger of starving. 

The boys became more and more difficult for Brad to manage, as they were shuttled from temporary lodging to temporary lodging. Aaron went to live with his grandmother, and a close friend convinced Brad to allow the other two boys to be placed in foster homes. This would result in Brad losing touch with his youngest son for over fifteen years. Two new family names would become intertwined with the Lawrence clan, when the boys were adopted by their foster parents. 

Parting with the boys seemed to break something in Brad. He began drinking continuously. For several months, he allowed himself to drift. He picked a crop in the central San Joaquin valley of California. Sometime during 1931, he came to the poorest section of Oakland, California, on the San Francisco Bay. He slept frequently in flop houses, for a quarter dollar per night. He worked often enough to stay alive, but much of the time he stayed drunk.  This situation lasted over a year. 

About the time Brad hit absolute bottom, his life was invaded by a stringy eight year old runaway named Ron. The youngster became the first of several whom Brad unofficially adopted, or who adopted him. When taken off the street, Ron at first refused to tell Brad anything more than his name. Sharing a meager breakfast, Brad realized that the youngster would have to be watched over if he was not to starve or be jailed for his shoplifting and other petty crimes.

For several weeks, Brad remained semi-sober. During those weeks, the two developed a wary respect for each other. Ron related in small pieces, a story of impossible home conditions and disaffection between his parents. Brad's drinking tapered off and he began keeping jobs. Eventually, Brad was able to convince the boy to send his parents a post card, informing him that he was alive and well. After three years with Brad, Ron returned home, though he left again as soon as he could convince an Army recruiter to overlook a year of his age. He would return from Europe in 1944, with multiple decorations for bravery under fire. 

While sheltering Ron, Brad moved out of Oakland. There was work to the south in Salinas; and along the Monterey Peninsula. Wages were sometimes twenty cents an hour, when Brad was lucky. More typically, he brought home a dollar for twelve hours' work. But the work put a modest roof over his head and food on his table.

	Shortly after Ron returned to his parents, Brad met and began courting Arlene. Brad's brother Timothy had married Arlene's sister the year before. Initially, Arlene put off Brad's proposals of marriage. She hesitated to leave her mother alone, now that there were no other children at home. Finally, Arlene consented. She and Brad settled in a small town on the Monterey Peninsula, in 1935 -- a few miles from Arlene's mother. 

Slowly, the economy and the times improved. It was fortunate that Brad found steady work, for there was soon a child in the household. Jerry was a large baby and a difficult pregnancy for Arlene. She was ill for months after the birth. Arlene's mother frequently cared for the child when Brad was at work. The older woman did not particularly like her son-in-law. Frictions began to develop. Arlene was often ill, and their limited circumstances seemed to make her illness worse. Brad didn't bring home enough money. They didn't go out. Whatever had happened to the gay life Arlene had led, when all the boys came to call at her mother’s house? 

To these irritations was added an additional strain: Daniel. A few months after the birth of the younger boy, Arlene announced she wanted nothing further to do with Brad. She moved out, to return home to her mother. After a separation of more than two years, a lawyer handed Brad divorce papers. Brad signed them unread, only later to learn that he had agreed to support Arlene at a level that exceeded his small wages. 

As Brad struggled with his finances, Arlene found herself with increasing difficulties. The boys became almost impossible to handle. Jerry began "throwing fits". When disciplined or opposed, he fell to the floor and thrashed out his anger. He was nearly six years old before some of his fits were diagnosed as Grand Mal epilepsy. By that time, his many falls and accidents had produced brain damage. He was admitted to a mental institution, where he would spend the remainder of his life with profoundly retarded intelligence. When Arlene's mother died, Daniel was sent to live with his maternal grandfather. Arlene would remarry within a year, only to divorce again when her handsome gambler had run through her small inheritance. 

Brad finally washed his hands of an impossible situation. He moved back to the San Francisco Bay area and got a job at a rock quarry and cement plant. The money was not good, but it was steady. Though his divorce was not yet final as he approached his 40th birthday, he began to consider finding a good woman and settling down. He had not long to wait. A friend asked him to join in a blind date. He was to escort a pretty girl named Mavis. 

The foursome went to a movie. Before the evening was over, Brad asked Mavis to see him again on the following night. Somewhat put off by this forward older man, she gave excuses. Well, what about the next night? Intrigued but wary, she consented. It seemed he planned to keep her well occupied during every night of that week. 

As they shared dinner the following weekend, Mavis paused in the midst of a bite of lemon pie. Her jaw did not seem to work. Less then seven days after her arrival in California and two days after she had gotten a job, she was coming down with mumps. At the time, mumps was considered a serious disease in adults; she was hospitalized for several days. However, the illness gave her only a brief respite from Brad. Brad came to see her often. When she returned to the trailer court where her cousins lived, Brad was there with flowers. He offered help with her sizable hospital bill, but she drew back. She would rather, she said, get help from home. Brad was later to learn that the help had come from a close male friend who wanted to marry Mavis. The refusal was a sharp blow to Brad's pride. 

When Mavis recovered, she again found work. Several hours of each day, she answered a telephone and made appointments for two doctors. Almost every evening, Brad was at the door to take her home. They went to movies and dances. They went to meetings of Brad's lodge group and to the parties of a growing collection of acquaintances who played cards and socialized. 

Brad became increasingly serious. He proposed marriage as soon as his divorce was final. Again, Mavis drew back. She liked this earnest man with his quiet charm, but was uncertain if she loved him. There was someone still in the South for whom she had once felt a great deal. Brad must wait until she explored the old feelings and felt sure of herself. 

She boarded a bus for Memphis, leaving behind a much-perturbed suitor. In the month she spent at home, she saw the man she had once believed she loved enough to marry. Events had changed them both. Though they still cared for each other, she could no longer see herself as his wife, tied to the farm he owned and the slow way of life he loved. She returned to California, met by an anxious Brad at the bus station. A few weeks later, she and Brad were married. They settled in a two bedroom house located in the suburbs of the San Francisco Peninsula. 

It would be only a matter of weeks before they were reminded of the many pieces of unfinished business in Brad's life. On their first Christmas Eve together, Mavis answered the doorbell, to find herself confronted by a uniformed police officer serving a court writ. Brad had not met the terms of his support agreement to his second wife, and Arlene had gotten a court judgment. Brad spent a night in jail, while Mavis searched for a bail bondsman. Weeks of the New Year were spent fighting the case through court again. Finally, a judge reduced Brad's alimony obligation, with a stern warning to both ex-spouses to seek other ways to resolve their differences. 
Brad and Mavis were among the many that clustered around radios in early December of 1941, to witness the beginning of yet another great world war. Though Brad was too old to volunteer, the war would soon have a direct effect on the couple. In 1942, the shipyards of San Francisco began turning out war materials. Skilled craftsmen in all the construction trades were needed. Brad took work as a ship fitter and cabinet maker in the yards. He was promoted to supervisor. Wages were the best he had ever earned. 

With their improved conditions, it became possible for Brad to again support some of his large family. Aaron came to live with them. The dark-haired 15 year old became a companion to Mavis during long summer afternoons when Brad worked late at the shipyards. Though she could not "mother" the youth, she tried to be his friend. Of all Brad's sons by his prior marriages, Aaron became the closest in later years. 

As their lives at last settled down, Brad and Mavis both began to look forward to starting a family of their own. Twice, she became pregnant. The first pregnancy was undiscovered until a harrowing miscarriage in the fourth month. The second resulted in miscarried twins. Mavis was advised by a specialist that she would never carry a child to full term. The polio of her early teens had deformed her reproductive organs. Disregarding this advice, the couple continued trying. 

To his own family, Brad added another adoptee, a young Dutch merchant mariner from the shipyards. Willi had been stranded in America in the earliest months of the war, injured by an accident in the yards, just as the European Low Countries fell to the Axis. Brad brought the tall, blond sailor home for supper. With his shy manners and upside-down English, Willi soon became a favorite at the lodge meetings he attended with Brad and Mavis. For whatever reason, he was never deeply attracted to the American girls he met. They were just a little too forward for his taste. 

Late in 1943, Mavis learned that she was again pregnant. Desperate to carry the child to full term, she was willing to talk with anyone who might offer a solution for her difficulties in birthing. Through a close friend of Brad's, the couple was introduced to a community of church people who seemed to offer reassurance. The church was deeply involved in a healing ministry. Their study of Christian metaphysics must have impressed both Brad and Mavis as a major departure from beliefs they had grown up with. Some of their friends were unimpressed and began staying away.

But in the Fall of 1944, a healthy son was born. A few weeks later, Mavis was able to march into the offices of the medical specialists whom she had previously consulted, to offer them an opportunity to view the medical miracle they had claimed could not happen. She was likewise able to march on legs that were of equal length, having discarded the inch-high lift that she had worn on her shoe for years. This experience established their unusual faith as a major element in their future lives. 

As 1944 drew to a close, it was evident that the war could not last much longer. Brad considered what the family would do when ship building tapered off. He left the yards to take a job in a small cabinet shop. Since the business was still struggling to establish itself, his hours were even longer than they had been before. Mavis looked for other activity to occupy herself. She went to work in early evenings as a waitress. 

Accustomed to arriving home with his dinner on the table, Brad found his wife's new job a source of considerable irritation. They argued at length. Mavis felt confined. They needed the additional money and she needed greater contact with people. Brad was outraged. Bob was less than a year old and, in Brad's opinion, needed a full-time mother. 

Mavis continued to work. One evening, she stayed on beyond her regular shift for an hour, talking with acquaintances. When she arrived home, Brad believed he detected liquor on her breath. They battled, and blows were exchanged. Nursing an obvious black eye, Mavis left within the week. Brad could learn to take care of the son he had wanted so much, and she needed time to be by herself and think things over. 

Mavis traveled to Reno. For several weeks, she worked as a waitress. She thought hard. Had she exchanged the tyranny of farm life in the South, for a different form in California? What had initially seemed to be Brad's courtliness had turned out to include an overbearing and near-violent thread of jealousy. After a few weeks, she sent him a post card. She would not come home, but if he would come to Reno they could meet. 

He came. Nervously, they sat down together in a restaurant. Yes, she was well. Yes, she had work and was able to support herself. Yes, she wanted to come home. But Brad had to understand that she could not be owned like somebody's favorite milk cow. Nor could he expect to keep her if he physically abused her. Both shed some tears. They boarded a bus together, and re-crossed the Sierra. 

It became obvious that the house to which the Lawrences returned in 1945 was too small for the family of four. They began to look for a place of their own. Their hopes were deferred, however, by the closure of the cabinet shop and Brad's search for work. Shortly thereafter, Brad encountered a man looking for a good carpenter. Hugh Stuart wanted to finish a rambling two-story house on his chicken farm by the edge of San Francisco Bay. He was willing to offer free housing to the family while the work was underway, and nominal rent thereafter. 

Brad grabbed the opportunity. For over a year, they lived in the midst of a constant construction project, to a chorus of hundreds of clucking hens and fryers. Stuart lived in an apartment attached to the house. Soon Mavis's father came to California, living with them several months in a heated garage on the ranch. It was only a matter of time before they would again outgrow their housing. 

Brad soon found other work for a construction contractor. He left early in the morning, to return late in the afternoon to a house populated by strong personalities. While Bobbie played among the walnut trees that shaded the chicken ranch, Stuart and Gramps argued over the painting that Gramps was doing around the place. Aaron was in his last year of high school. His next-eldest brother (now adopted as Peter Sinclair) lived with his adoptive parents only a few miles away. The two boys were frequent companions, possibly to the discomfiture of both sets of involved elders. There were many cross currents in the family sea. 

Mavis grew convinced that they needed a place of their own. In the area around them, many small homes were being built. A developer had bought up large tracts of land and was populating the region with pre-built "roll-away" homes, priced from $7000. Brad bought a lot up the street from the ranch, hoping that they would be able to afford a house to go on the land "some day soon". Then Bobbie spent three days in the hospital with Tonsillitis. The house had to be postponed. 

Months went by and still the house seemed out of reach. Finally exasperated, Mavis sought out a former employer of Brad's. The banks would not lend them money unless they could make a cash down payment. The employer knew he could depend on her to repay a loan, even if she had to work for the rest of her life to make good the debt. He gave her the $500 she needed. She labored almost three years as a house keeper, paying off that initial loan as they struggled to meet other obligations. 

Soon the prefabricated house rolled down the street behind a truck, and onto the foundation that Brad had poured in his early evenings and weekends. They -- and the bank -- finally had a home of their own. After almost eight years of marriage, they had a real beginning. 

*** *** ***
Kids, this story may give you some idea of my beginnings. My roots are in some ways modest; by present standards perhaps poor. But this history is typical of large numbers of people my age. Now, perhaps, you may better understand what is intended by the term "generation gap". I doubt that many of these stories would seem familiar to acquaintances of your age. 

There are continuing themes here, and continuing values. Not the least of these is the value of hard work and striving. The striving of previous generations has shaped my life. You may find that striving also touches your lives and the lives of your children. 

Every now and then, I hope you will pause a moment and listen. Imagine the whine of leather belts driving a lumber mill band saw, and the sharp smell of hot sawdust. Wonder a little, what your borrowed Sioux great grandmothers would advise to cure a bad cough. Such images are in their own way, very true to life. We'll be ready to move on, shortly. But that is the work of the next chapter. For now, relax and dream a little.