Please bear with me, I'm long winded and I like to tell stories. Hopefully I can provide a bit of human interest, a smile or two in these troubled times, give the reader something to think about and perhaps even convince a few people that I'm not just a Don Quixote like figure jousting with windmills; there are actually dragons that need slaying! If I only had a fraction of Baxter Black's immense talent, I'd eventually die a happy man.
My father came home to my mom in 1946 and I was born February 10th, 1947. Not a lot of wasted time! My father didn't have a formal education and as he described it, it was a really hard life trying to make a living painting houses in the small east Texas town of Nacogdoches. He was 26 years old with a wife and two small children, my older brother and me, and I've heard we were just barely scraping by.
As luck would have it, the U.S. Air Force was created on July 26th, 1947 and after a summer of manual labor under a blazing sun, Dad said "to hell with this nonsense" and went down and reenlisted. Thus began my life as a military brat. I'll say from experience that there are both advantages and disadvantages to growing up in a military family. Even today, I'm not sure if the gains outweighed the losses but I'm certain my life would have turned out much different had I stayed in the east Texas piney woods.
My fathers assignment until the U.S. entered the Korean War was at Shepard A.F.B. Texas and we lived in Bastrop, a few hundred miles away from where I was born. I was baptized in the Southern Baptist Church and had I spent my whole life without moving around, I likely would have sold insurance, raised chickens and kids, cursed the summer sun and lived for high school football, praying that at least one of the kids would be a star quarterback and get a scholarship to A&M or Tech or Texas. Church every Sunday and perhaps an occasional rendezvous with the secretary at the NoTel Motel. Typical small town Texas life for anyone who's ever seen it; I still have relatives who live it.
I belonged to a Southern Baptist Church that didn't quite fit the sterotypical Holy Roller (no offense) image but I still remember long services and a lot of fire, brimstone and going to hell. Pure happenstance but I started high school in California. It was the early sixties and I started to question a lot of the beliefs I had grown up with. The early Viet Nam protest started, SDS was formed at Berkley, my distant relative Bobby and Huey Newton were getting politically active and seeds of Flower Power were sown in Haight Asbury and Golden Gate Park. Around that time, I first heard "Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll" in San Francisco so I yelled "Sign me up!" and my transformation from "Good Southern Baptist" to heathen hedonist was complete.
Hopefully I've grown a bit since then and today I describe myself as a "reluctant agnostic". Reluctant because I think it would be wonderful to turn my life over to any God and perhaps absolve myself of some of the responsibility for the many transgressions I've committed and agnostic because I just can't bring myself to accept God or Allah or Jehovah or whatever on faith alone.
However, I firmly believe there is an natural order to the universe that I can't explain and I accept that order on observation and faith. Call it fate, predestination, Karma, Kismet or insert your belief here, I believe we all have a purpose and my, however minor, purpose at this small microcosm of time is to help a few people in some small way.
My point (thank God mumbled under the breath) is that the 2500 or so members of ATU Local 1001 are getting a raw deal and it's time to challenge the folks responsible. You take our money and forget it doesn't belong to you! You forget you work for the members, not the other way around! More posts to come :-). I haven't forgotten First Transit but at this time the union is more important. All times come in the natural order.
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