That could take a while. I grew up in a very small town, where I was related to most of the people I knew. I had four brothers, three older and one younger; still do, actually. My mom was my Cub Scout den mother, and my father was my Boy Scout scout leader, a task that he enjoyed far more than she did, I believe. The only key to our house was a skeleton key, and we never locked the doors. The family attended the Bethel Mission Covenant Church a little further up the hill from our house. Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday nights we were there. For a time, my task was cranking out the church bulletin on the church mimeograph machine. Being a procrastinator, I most always did this late Saturday night, and it was scary in that basement at night. There would be sounds like footsteps on the floor above and sometimes I was pretty sure there were ghosts. Because the church was never locked either, and because we had no township library, I would sit in the church library at night sometimes reading because, as I remember it, there were a lot of books there, and then the sounds would be coming from the basement. In the summers, we made shacks out in the woods, and would sometimes sleep in them doing winter weekends as well. There was a time when everyone was replacing their gas-driven washing machines with electric machines, and throwing their old ones in the trash. These motors were great go-kart motors. Elementary school went through the eighth grade. After that, we were bused to Stephenson, a few miles away, for high school.
Browns, blacks or tans. I used to prefer jeans but I don't wear denim so well anymore so I look for something with a drawstring, unless I'm going out in the woods, then I'll look for something a little more rugged.
Ken..what is your idea of a perfect day? Second Q is.. Did you ever play a practical joke on anyone..and how did it go? Third Q is.. If you could visit one foreign county..all expenses paid...for one month..which country would you choose?
1. Imagining that our camp is done. It's a beautiful day, and my wife is there with me, and not complaining about bears and such. 2. Frequently. But I'll give you one. When I worked for Los Fresnos EMS, we served the INS facility in Bayview, Texas, which is a large immigration facility. We were called there for an emergency, and one of our EMTs (Mike), who didn't get to the station in time to go out on the ambulance, drove his car out there. We didn't really need any additional help because the INS facility was well staffed with doctors and nurses. Like most people in the Rio Grande Valley, he was Mexican-American and about eighteen or nineteen at the time. On the way out, he was following the ambulance in his car when I got to the guard's gate. I asked him if he would give the guy behind us a hard time. When Mike came by the station, he said the guard detained him for forty-five minutes, asking if he was a citizen, and if he could prove that he was a citizen. When he produced his driver's license and EMT card, the guard told him he'd need something more official, like a birth certificate. As he was telling us, he didn't realize that I had set him up for it. 3. Probably the Channel Islands.
Hi Ken, you're very much involved in the church as I understand it, and I'm surmising that this stems from your religious upbringing....so 2 questions if I may ? Did you ever consider becoming a Priest/ or an ordained Minister...and if not why not? Also...if you had your life to live over again from the age of 16 would you live it differently..and in what way?
I was intrigued that in answer to Karen's question "If you could visit one foreign county..all expenses paid...for one month..which country would you choose?" you chose the Channel Islands, what made you choose there? Also I may be mistaken but did I read on one of your blogs/websites that you had been to the UK in the past?
1. I attended Bible college for a couple of years, and have served as a youth minister and as an interim pastor of a few churches, although these were not positions that I had sought out. 2. If I were to live it over knowing what I do now, I wouldn't be able to help but do so. For one thing, I would have been far more conscious about healthy living knowing how it catches up to you at the end, and I might have actually chosen one career and stuck with it, rather than simply taking what was available to me at the time, and what I enjoyed doing. Then again, if I were to have done things differently, I'd be a different person now and, aside from the health problems and not being filthy rich, I'm happy with myself.
Several. I worked near the Mexican border, and there were several areas called "colonias," which were unapproved subdivisions consisting mostly of people who were not in the country legally. If they went into the hospital for a delivery long before they were ready to deliver, they would be turned away, or so they feared. Consequently, they usually waited until just before they were ready to deliver before calling the ambulance, and the nearest hospital was forty-five minutes away. We had several female paramedics and when we had a female paramedic available, I would willingly pass the task onto them, not because I was afraid to do it, but because the patients were usually more comfortable with a female medic, and particularly one who spoke Spanish better than I did. But, as the only paid member of an otherwise volunteer crew, I made about eighty percent of the calls, and there wasn't always a female medic available. It's not a hard job, since the mother does all of the work. The pressure comes into play when there is a complication, because then there are two patients.