My first career after college was flying the A-7D Corsair for the USAF in a little hamlet called Myrtle Beach, SC. (Today, not such a little hamlet). I went on a cruise out of Miami for three days to the Bahamas on the USS Emerald Seas. It was fun, but I think the ship was … More ChangesTheBook Chapter 23

Not all inventions had competing types. Some were just so cool that the world took them on. Like the need for a bowl when the ice cream purveyors ran out of bowls on a hot Chicago day, and you invent by necessity the ice cream cone. Or like the drive through window mentioned earlier, and … More ChangesTheBook Chapter 22

Someone had just figured out that you could lay a cable completely across the Atlantic ocean, and make phone calls so here was our Father, in Libya, calling on a phone to us in SC. It took us going to a special station, waiting an hour or so for the team to get it going. … More ChangesTheBook Chapter 21

We had moved from Alaska to Delaware and Dad had taken us to see the arrival and Christening, complete with a champagne bottle, of a military airplane called a Gooney Bird. It was incredibly large and ugly by standards then. Must have been at least two stories or more high. It sported a very large … More ChangesTheBook Chapter 20

Where were you this day in History?  Please offer your comments in this blog.  I remember my son calling me to ask if I had heard of the events.  That was my first notice. Later that day, it struck me how incredibly friendly, generous and supportive we all had become in our daily lives.  I … More 9/11/2001

Our SUV (that term was not coined until much later. Anyone know when?) was a Chevy four door station wagon. It had bench seats, and a new one added looking backwards. You could easily crawl over the backs of the seats, because they didn’t have head rests. Head rests were that. Whoever thought about using … More ChangesTheBook Chapter 19

With four growing kids in my family, in the 50‘s and 60‘s, we needed to figure out a better way of feeding en masse. So the folks bought one of the first ever, chest style deep freeze, freezers. Defrost was done usually by me or my brother. You emptied everything and put huge buckets of … More ChangesTheBook Chapter 18

Before Coffee, what was brewed? Probably, they just ground up whatever roots were in the forest, because the bean of coffee couldn’t have come into common use until later. But then that was the time that you would only get groceries at the produce stand, in some sort of farmers market part of the town … More ChangesTheBook Chapter 17

We did have an electric stove. I am sure, one of the first. It never did seem much an improvement on the good old gas stove, but much better than the wood stove that my grandparents would have used. You kept it hot always, in case you wanted to stroll in and have a cup … More ChangesTheBook Chapter 16

After just having finished a move, I reflected on the phenomenon of this excercise.  Some of the things that came to mind as I remember back, are the types of homes that now exist, the neigborhoods, and how we move. Sometimes, I see people in their pickup trucks moving stuff around, and I think about … More Changes of the abode kind