BOB LAMB'S LIFE

PREFACE:

This is a story about my life. It may not be a great literary endeavor, but it could make the reader remember some of the things in his or her life that were enjoyable and maybe they had forgotten.

I am going to write as much as I can remember. It is hoped that this can be an enjoyment to the reader.

Chapter 1

I was born in Wilson N. Jones Hospital on the west side of Sherman Texas. It was March 14, 1937 about 8 in the morning. Many times my uncle Vernon told the story of how my father John Robert Lamb came rushing into the Lamb Family farmhouse and exclaimed with great enthusiasm how he just became the father of a healthy 9-pound boy named Bobby Dan Lamb. My father said I was named after him (Robert) and his friend, a cab driver, Dan.

My uncles have told that story many times and that's how I remember it. One thing that stands out in their minds is the fact that it was an unusually cold winter that year and the day I was born it snowed. This was unusual for Texas in March.

I have been told that my first home was on Cherry Street in East Sherman, Texas. My mother, Tempi Pauline Robbins Lamb, told me about my sister that had died before I was born. Her name was Wanda June Lamb and she only lived 9 days. Mother said she didn't know why she died. It may have been what came to known many years later as SIDS, (sudden infant death syndrome).



My first portrait

When my sister died, my father bought 13 cemetery lots in Shannon Cemetery near Sherman. Wanda June was the first to be buried there. Then in 1943 my grandfather, Robert Newton Lamb was buried there. The next one to be buried there was my own daughter, Valerie Lynn Lamb, who died Sept. 6, 1963 in Athens Greece. However, I am getting out of sequence, so I'll talk more about this later.

To get a perspective on what was happening in the world, I will put in bits and pieces that I can glean from different publications. One source I will use is the Compton Electronic Encyclopedia. Other sources are CDs. One from Life Magazine and another CD, from Time magazine. I will transfer the information directly from the CD's

Here's What Happened the Year I was born: 1937

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is president of the US

The first coast-to-coast radio broadcast reports the explosion of the Hindenburg

Joe Louis becomes the world heavyweight champ by knocking out James J. Braddock

Amelia Earhart and co-pilot Fred Noonam are lost in the Pacific near Howland Island

President Roosevelt's plan to "pack" the Supreme Court is rejected by Congress

Colin Powell, Jack Nicholson, Saddam Hussein, George Carlin, Bobby D. Lamb, and Dustin

Hoffman are born

New York Yankees win the World Series

Washington Redskins win the NFL championship

Detroit Red Wings win the Stanley Cup

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first feature-length animated movie, is released

Daffey Duck and Elmer Fudd made their debut, as well Edgar Bergen and his puppet Charlie

McCarthy makes their radio debut on NBC, and the Glenn Miller Band debuts in New York.

Cost of a first-class stamp: $0.03

But on the day I was born, Sunday Mar 14 Battle of the Century: Fred Allen & Jack Benny meet on Radio; very fitting my parents loved them both!

Next is from "TIME" Magazine CD;

"It is estimated that an average of 600,000 to 800,000 dwelling units ought to be built annually over the next five years to overcome the accumulated shortage and to meet the normal growth in number of families. In other words, we could build over the next five years three or four million housing units, which at a moderate estimate of $4,000 per unit would mean spending from twelve to 16 billion dollars, without creating a surplus of housing accommodations, and consequently without impairing the value of existing housing that is fit for decent human occupancy."

Under the National Housing Act of 1934, an individual could borrow up to $2,000 from a bank--with 20% of the principal guaranteed by the Government--to improve, repair or modernize his house. He could borrow up to $16,000 from a bank to build a new house--at 5% (in some cases 6%) interest, with the total mortgage guaranteed by the Government for a premium of at least .5% when the principal did not Exceed 80% of the estimated value of the property, and limited dividend corporations could get insurance on mortgages up to $10,000,000 on the same terms for large scale developments for rent to “The long-continued lag in building," said the FHA, "is a drag on all industry and trade . . . This industry, to a greater extent than any other, can put idle funds to work and thus speed up the circulation of the nation's money supply . . . We must recognize clearly that housing will not be built if costs are too high in relation to the consumer's income. The fact that housing costs rose sharply--far too sharply--between September of 1936 and March of 1937 was primarily responsible for the downturn in housing and thus in recovery generally this year.... The sharp rise of wage rates and prices in this industry, just before the last building season, reduced by 100,000 to 150,000 the number of new dwelling units that competent authorities had estimated were in prospect for 1937.

1) Raising the insurable limit of a mortgage from 80% to 90% of a property's appraised value when it is less than $6,000 which would mean that if an individual could persuade the bank his credit was good, he could move into a $6,000 house for $600 down.

2) Reducing interest and service charges on insured loans from 5 1/2% to 5% net.

3) Making the mortgage insurance premium .5% on the "diminishing balance" instead of on the face value of the mortgage, cutting the premium to .25% on properties worth $6,000 or less whose mortgages are insured before July 1, 1939.

4) Limiting mortgages on groups of houses or apartments constructed under F.H.A. allowances to $1,000 a room and liberalizing provisions for chartering National Mortgage Associations which, specially regulated by the Administrator, would be enabled to finance large loans to limited dividend companies through the sale of housing bonds and debentures secured by insured mortgages. The RFC would supply $50,000,000 to such newly formed organizations "for capital purposes." Net effect of this amendment would be to encourage the development of large-scale, low cost projects.

Thomas R. Marshall of North Manchester, Ind., who 20 years ago was not only Vice President of the U.S. but also the Will Rogers of the era, was the author of a brief tale: "Once upon a time there were two brothers. One went to sea. The other was elected Vice President. Neither was ever heard from again." Tom Marshall did not live to hear about a Vice President who went to sea and was next heard from when he landed with the Marines to take the situation well in hand.

Thus did John Nance Garner land last week in Washington. Returning from a vacation in Texas he had joined the train which brought back the bickering mourners from the funeral of Senator Joseph T. Robinson and set foot in a scene of the greatest political confusion which Washington had witnessed in many years. At the Capitol a group of resolute Democrats stood entrenched with the firm resolve that the Supreme Court Bill should not pass. At the White House, mile and a half away, sat a grim President not only determined that it should pass but still expecting that it would. From the moment of his arrival, white- haired Jack Garner took charge of the situation.

August 16, 1937 THE CONGRESS :59 Minutes

"Well Alben, you told me to do it and, by George, I did it." These jubilant words were spoken last week by Vice President John Nance Garner to the Senate's Democratic Leader Alben Barkley. What the Vice President had just done was to end, in one minute less than an hour, the bitter Senate wrangle that had tied up U.S. legislation for the last six months. Using the steamroller tactics that he learned as Speaker of the House, Vice President Garner had with an historic gesture put the modified Court Bill through the U.S. Senate without a dissenting vote.

[The great evil of the 20th century's fourth decade was the triumph of totalitarian regimes in which of Europe, and the fear and moral cowardice that they engendered in much of the rest of the world. German National Socialism and Russian Marxism-Leninism and to a somewhat lesser degree, Italian fascism, have more to unite than to divide them. Josef Stalin's dictatorship used the theme of class hatred to whip up enthusiasm, divide his enemies, and drown dissent. Adolf Hitler's used race hatred, then a more widespread obsession than in today's closer-linked, cosmopolitan world. Neither man paid more than lip service to ideology; both were absolute autocrats, who gathered all power into their own hands and relied on systematically applied terror to hold on to it.

Stalin had inherited the apparatus of totalitarianism set up by Vladimir Lenin--the overlapping state and party organs, the systemic deceit, spying and betrayal, and above all a ubiquitous, brutal secret police organization. Italy's Benito Mussolini was an admirer of Lenin. Hitler learned from Lenin and Stalin how to entrench a vicious minority regime in power. Later in the decade, Stalin used the pattern of Hitler's purges of his own henchmen and supporters for use in his own Great Terror.

As the decade opened, Stalin had decided that the eight years of relatively lenient treatment of the Russian peasantry would have to end. The policy had been adopted after the great famine of 1921, which occurred because the more than 100 million farmers refused to be coerced into providing an agricultural surplus, and millions were starving in the cities. But no longer were the peasants to remain outside the system of totalitarian control.]

[Virtually all peasants resisted collectivization, and in the violence unleashed in the next few months five million were killed, as many as ten million sent to labor camps. The peasants burned their crops and slaughtered their livestock rather than turn them over to the state. Little of this reached the Western press, however, until the telltale signs of hunger appeared again in cities like Moscow.]

(February 1, 1937)

The first quoting interview ever given by J. Stalin to a foreign journalist was obtained by Eugene Lyons, manager of the United Press Moscow Bureau for many years. Now resident in the U.S. and writing widely. Mr. Lyons turned out in the January American Mercury a dispassionate, detailed six-point analysis of how it happens that in the Soviet Union there is so much abject confessing of whatever it would do the Dictator good to have confessed.

Mr. Lyons, veteran of innumerable Moscow trials, says in sum that Soviet prisoners who do not succeed in convincing the henchmen of Justice that they can be depended on to confess fairly convincingly in open court are never brought to trial at all, just taken downstairs and shot.

Justice today, in Russian cases of importance, according to Mr. Lyons, does not in the great majority of cases ever reach a courtroom. Scores, even hundreds of Russians are quietly executed after the Soviet police have satisfied themselves that they require Death. In perhaps 1% of cases involving crimes for which Death is the penalty, sound Red propaganda makes a public trial advisable. Writes Eugene

Lyons: "The prisoners brought to trial are always a handful carefully selected from a larger number arrested on the same charge . . . hand picked specimens painstakingly sorted out." After Soviet

news organs have announced the confessions, convictions and executions, "a condemned man whose execution was announced may still be alive, as a result of a bargain or for some other reason . . . The Soviet State does not deliver up the bodies of the men and women it executes . . . There is not even habeas cadaver and of course no habeas corpus in the Soviet Union."

In a dispatch from Moscow not long ago the rumor that Soviet scientists had invented a gas with the special property of deranging the mentality of a prisoner so as to make him speak and behave for

Some hours afterward as hypnotically required by Justice, was cautiously mentioned, the writer still employed in Moscow. Without resorting to the hypothesis of such "confession gas," Mr. Lyons

Mentions that the use of hostages (wives, children or others dear to the prisoners) is an old Soviet custom, and moreover that in Moscow the authorities have now had 20 full years in which to perfect their

"Third degree methods, familiar enough in all police systems" to "an extreme of refined cruelty . . .”

"There have been instances when . . . the victim's children were tortured before his eyes--a more terrible ordeal for the father than any that could be inflicted on his own body."

[Arrests and trials followed without end, some public, and most secret. More than 5,000 party members already arrested were executed after Zinoviev and Kamenev. The secret police themselves were

Thoroughly purged. Then Stalin turned on the Red Army. The widening circle of terror spread to the provinces and beyond them to the diplomatic corps abroad.]

(April 12, 1937)

This week in Moscow the most drastic government shakeup of vice-Commissars and the official bureaucracy ever ordered by J. Stalin was in full swing. Simultaneously came the most sensational demotion in Russia since that of Trotsky eight years ago: dismissed from the Cabinet of Commissars with every indication that he is to be arrested and tried was enigmatic Genrikh ("Henry") Grigorivich Yagoda, who for ten years served as head of Stalin's Ogpu, the dread secret police, and rose to be Commissar of Internal Affairs. If this close colleague of Stalin is now to spout confessions in court, the Dictator will have discovered an adherent of "Trotskyism" among the two or three men he most trusted.

All Moscow signs pointed to Russia containing today so many "Trotskyists"--that is, critics of Stalin--that the Dictator must now (in addition to making popular appeals) attempt within the Communist

Hierarchy to win over by cajolery and threats as many "Trotskyists" as he can, and by executions wipe out the rest. Uncertain this week as to just who are friends, who foes, harassed J. Stalin made two opposite

moves.

(May 31, 1937)

Ordered established in all military districts were war councils of three similar to those set up in the infancy of the Russian Revolution when a Red Army was being licked into shape by ex-Tsarist officers who had to be watched closely for signs of treachery. Stalin thus aimed last week at uncovering incipient Trotskyism or other heresies in his previously potent military commanders, who in future must get their orders countersigned by at least one other council member (probably a civilian) mainly interested in the welfare of the Communist Party.

This shakeup followed the demotion week before of Mikhail Nikolaivich Tukhachevsky, youngest and most brilliant of the Soviet's five field marshals. For some reason not officially explained he was stripped of his office--and sidetracked to a comparatively insignificant Volga military district immune from foreign invasion, with headquarters at Kuibishev. All that Russians knew was that he had been "mentioned with suspicion" by the prosecuting GPU during last January's trial of "Trotskyites." He was entirely

Absolved, but it was expected in Moscow that "something might happen to him: because sudden misfortunes had befallen others similarly "mentioned."

(June 21, 1937)

The trial did not take long. The defendants, as is Communist custom, loudly pleaded guilty. Judge Ulrich gave out the verdict: "The court had established that the defendants were employed by the

Military secret service of a foreign government conducting an unfriendly policy against the Soviet Union. They...permitted wrecking acts intended to undermine the power of the Red Army and to prepare

for . . . the defeat of the Red Army in event of an attack against it . . . "

Promptly then the big gold star was ripped from the cap of Marshal Tukhachevsky, the four red pips from the collars of his colleagues, and all eight of them fell dead before the acrid volleys of a firing squad. Official Pravda wrote their obituary: "Dogs die like dogs. There is no place for such murderers in the Soviet scheme of things."

Because the Bolshevik enthusiasm of Tukhachevsky and his fellow culprits was not questioned until very recently, the official charge that they had sold military secrets was not accepted in any informed

Quarter. Two conflicting explanations for the executions seemed equally valid: that Stalin had uncovered a plot in the high command of the Red Army to usurp his own political power; that Stalin, now turned

Conservative is systematically doing away with all old-line BOLSHEVIKS.

The Red Army's commander, Klimentiy Voroshilov, is still Dictator Stalin's most prized adviser. Immediately after the executions last week "Klim" Voroshilov sent a message to all Red Army units:

"Tukhachevsky and other lackeys of capitalism have been abolished from the face of the earth, their memory to be cursed and forgotten."

(December 13, 1937)

Summons after summons continued last week to call Soviet ambassadors, ministers and members of their staff's home to Moscow from abroad. Once they reached the Soviet capital most of those recalled are no longer seen. Inquiries from friends abroad or foreign governments with whom they have been conducting negotiations receive no reply from the Soviet Foreign Office.

Meanwhile last week all Russia observed the third anniversary of the assassination of Dictator Joseph Stalin's famed "Dear Friend Sergei" Kirov. Even since then the Dictator has been almost daily grilling and shooting prominent Russians especially Communists.

Among some 1,300 victims have been the President and Premier of two Union Republics, both suicides; a most illustrious Marshal of the Red Army and seven of his Generals, all shot; the onetime Chief of the Soviet Munitions Trust, shot; even the editor of the Soviet State's own news organ Izvestia, who was arrested. In Russia, where it is impossible to throw up one's job and flee, since the greater part of the Soviet frontier is sealed with barbed wire and guarded day and night, the number of suicides among Russians of consequence is said to have touched as high as 200 per week.

(January 4, 1937)

In their cables this week, seasoned China correspondents had an adjective for the way in which the kidnaping of Premier & Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was ended, and all adjective was "Preposterous." In any Occidental sense it was preposterous that the most powerful man in Eastern Asia should have been violently over-powered with the killing of 46 of his guards; lost his false teeth in the process; insisted upon reading the Bible during most of his 13 days' captivity at the hands of a "onetime dope fiend," Young

Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang; and then should suddenly have returned by air to Nanking announcing that he himself was partly to blame for his own kidnaping and that the kidnappers had let him go partly because

They had been much moved by reading some 50,000 words of his private diary covering 1936! In Oriental eyes there was nothing preposterous about all this--it was just Chinese "face saving."

Straight to her kidnaped husband rushed impulsive Mme Chiang and made him comfortable with a new set of false teeth she had brought in her purse. Next thing China knew, Generalissimo Chiang, Mme Chiang and Banker Soong all joined in sending the most positive orders to the Nanking Government that it forces under War Minister General Ho Ying-chin must not approach any nearer to Sian, and they halted in their tracks.

Unquestionably cash--millions in ransom for China's Premier--figured in the deal made at Sian, and presumably this was handled entirely by T. V. Soong in as non-governmental a capacity as possible. After all it was his own brother-in-law he was trying to rescue, and the House of Soong is the No. 1 family of China. Agreement having been reached--and apparently the kidnapper forgot all about his original high-sounding demand that the kidnappee must lead China into an immediate war with Japan.

[In fact, it was the Communists who had been reading Chiang's diaries and had become convinced of his will to fight the Japanese. There followed, a few months later, a skirmish--the "incident at the

Marco Polo Bridge" outside Peking--that pitched the two sides into full-scale war. The instigators will never be known, but unlike the Manchurian provocation of 1931, it was almost certainly not manufactured by the Japanese.]

(July 19, 1937)

Meanwhile Japanese forces in North China had given notice of daytime maneuvers near Peiping. Savage shooting began at night and according to a Chinese official communique: "The Japanese fired first

After certain persons had fired on Japanese emerging from Fengtai barracks for night maneuvers around Wanpinhsien and Lukouchiao." These two centres soon saw pitched battles in which 16 Japanese and some 200 Chinese were killed, with Japanese artillery plunking poorly aimed shells, one of which landed in the empty bed of a local Chinese magistrate. Increasingly sharp fighting made it no clearer who were

the "certain persons" who opened fire before the Japanese "fired first," but the Chinese Government at Nanking for the first time began acting as if it were ready for war with Japan.

Never before has Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek been reported sending on troop trains, in the direction of Japanese forces, the German-trained army of crack Chinese troops known as "Chiang's

Own." Latest dispatches said these were rumbling from central toward northern China, and the Japanese Embassy officials had been handed a Chinese note of such unprecedented vigor that they were visibly

Flabbergasted. The note demanded that the Japanese Government "formally apologize for the hostilities" in North China, then "punish the Japanese officers responsible and pay an indemnity for the Chinese

Casualties."

(August 9, 1937)

In Nanking last week the Dictator of China, wise and watchful Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek manifestoed: "China is determined to fight to the last man!...The policy of our Government has been

Consistent from beginning to end; namely, that we cannot surrender any territory or allow our sovereignty to be encroached upon. I call upon the Nation to mobilize our total resources and struggle hand-in-hand

To save China!"

(September 6, 1937)

In Tokyo last week, Cabinet Ministers scuttled in & out of Emperor Hirohito's moat-encircled palace. The assent of the Son of Heaven was required to dozens of decisions, most important of all to the drastic decision of the military high command to ship Japan's entire regular army--some 260,000 men--across the sea to China.

Staring glassily through his myopic eyes, and nodding his flat, imperial head, Hirohito gave approval to military plans which launched Japan upon a great national adventure.

Every few centuries since long before Christ, history has repeated itself in China. A warlike people, coming usually from the north, covet the vast fertile plains lying north and south of the peninsula of Shantung. Advancing step by step in a few years or a few generations, they seize the ground they cover. Such was evidently the modest plan of the Japanese who know their history when, advancing from Manchukuo, they set out in July to take possession of the northern part of Hopei Province. Their plans for an inexpensive pay-as-you-go conquest were rudely upset by the explosion at Shanghai when the Chinese attempted to bomb the Japanese admiral's flagship and attacked the Japanese forces in the International Settlement.

Last week's decision to ship the entire Japanese Army to China meant but one thing: Japan had committed herself to speeding up the slow process of history many times repeated in three millenniums. At Shanghai, nearly 100,000 Japanese troops were already involved. The campaign could no longer be fought locally. A new field of operations had been opened and the great triangle between Peiping, Shanghai and the mountains on the west had become a potential battleground.

[The Chinese bravely defended Shanghai, but could not hold back the tide elsewhere. North China was completely infested by the Japanese, whose naval forces began blockading the Chinese coast and

Pushing up the major rivers. By autumn, the Japanese had 200,000 men, almost their entire standing army, in China. In November, Shanghai fell; in December, Nanking, Chiang's capital. After the Japanese army entered the capital city, one of the most horrific incidents of this or any war took place: the "rape of Nanking," in which Japanese radical officers went mad with blood lust and butchered 200,000-300,000 people. News reports only began filtering out when the carnage was over.]

(April 26, 1937) "Babes In Arms"

Having participated in the most refreshing musical show of the previous season, “On Your Toes,” Messrs. Rodgers & Hart were felicitated for having picked a novel notion this season for the first show they

Ever provided with a book as well as songs and lyrics, Babes in Arms. Lyricist Hart--never topped since he observed in 1925 that "beans cold get no keener reception in a beanery: bless our mountain greenery

Home!"--still maintains the lightest touch in the business. As usual, the Rodgers melodies are fresh as a May wind, artful and surprising as the flight of a barn swallow. George Balanchine's ballets, particularly a long dream dance, continue to set marks for more serious masters to shoot for.

(May 31, 1937)

Room Service does for shoestring theatrical producing what Producer George Abbott's Boy Meets Girl did for Hollywood and his Three Men on a Horse did for horse racing. It pumps its subject full of fun in veterinary doses. Than this pinchback legend of Longacre Square, there is no funnier show in town.

Veteran theater people and veteran theater-goers will particularly relish the venality, innocence, hope and cynicism of such a character as Gordon Miller (Sam Levene), who once produced a great a show on a sidewalk between two No Parking signs and is now trying like a man possessed to produce another from a double room in the White Way Hotel. His initial handicap lies in the fact that he has already run up a bill for $1,200 and is about to be evicted. Lacking costumes and scenery, his cast starving, his author (Eddie Albert) about to be lured by another producer, his backer a jittery character from Wall Street who has just stopped payment on a $15,000 check, Gordon Miller falters but never quite loses his how or his senses of duplicity and humor. As interpreted by Actor Levine, the leading role of Room Service is a brutal assault on most spectators’ funny bones.

(December 6, 1937)

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, like the best seller it faithfully follows, takes a squinty look at life among the bindle stiffs, reports out of the side of its mouth in short, hair-raising words. A soundly written, expertly produced play, its close-knit suspense timed to the last held breath, it seemed fated by first-nighters' extraordinary enthusiasm to extraordinary success. Some partisans, reading between its hard-bitten lines a sweeping social preachment, freely prophesied that it would win the Pulitzer Prize. Even those who saw in it only a macabre fold-melodrama applauded the play's outspokenness and sincerity.

The play shows the strange, tragic comradeship of Lennie, a huge, fetish-bound dullard whose innocent pleasure was to pet small, furry things, who’s vice was his crazy strength that inevitably killed the things he loved to touch; and George, a wiry, roadwise nomad whose chief job in life was looking after Lennie. The hopeless fairy tale that George (Wallace Ford) tells Lennie (Broderick Crawford) over and over about the little house on the little piece o'land, with an affairs patch and rabbits for Lennie to pet, where one day they will live "off the fatta the land" was more than a bedtime story. It was George's dream, and the dream of every wandering ranch hand that reaps the planting of others, collects his fifty a month, moves on to other planters' harvests. Then Lennie, without meaning to, kills the boss's son's wife and George mercifully shoots him before the lynchers get there.

The fate of the play lay in the hands of young, Broderick Crawford, 210-lb. ex-football player, son of Comedienne Helen Broderick. Built up into a hulking, shuffling imbecile by means of four-inch shoes and padded shoulders. Crawford won sympathy for a monstrous character, playing Lennie as a pathetic giant who kills as innocently as an unintentionally offending child.

(May 3, 1937)

“A Star Is born “, starts by making the point that one girl in a hundred thousand who go to Hollywood to be stars becomes one. It then examines the career of the exception--Esther Victoria Blodgett (Janet

Gaynor) who, the day she arrives on the Coast, financed by her grandmother's nest egg, tiptoes into the outer lobby of Grauman's Chinese Theater and stands tremulously in the cement footprints of her favorite actor, Norman Maine. From this point on, the story of A Star Is Born does not differ in superficial outline from the story that has been told a hundred times, usually as an excuse for weak screen musicals. It does differ--as Esther Blodgett is supposed to differ from her competitors--in essentials.

Not until, with three weeks rent due at her boardinghouse, she gets a job as waitress at a party given by Producer Oliver Niles (Adolphe Menjou), does Esther encounter her hero in the flesh. By this time, like the rest of Hollywood, she is aware that Norman Maine (Fredric March) is a habitual drunkard whose dipsomaniac pranks are an intolerable nuisance or an aspect of his charm, depending on the point of view.

The private tragedies of Hollywood cinema actors are something which the rest of the world, except possibly the readers of cinemagazines, can take in its stride. It is precisely this point of view as contrasted with Norman Maine's own evaluation of his decline and its effect on his wife that gives the latter portion of A Star Is Born its effectiveness. The drunken speech in which Maine betrays his jealousy when his wife gets an Academy Award; his sojourn in a sanatorium to recover from the jitters; his fist fight with Nile's

Press agent at Santa Anita race track, are related with superlative detachment. They lead up to the climactic scene in which sunset on the Pacific--a magnificent shot which is possibly the best individual

Justification of Technicolor yet seen on the screen--tempts Maine to an appropriately exhibitionistic suicide, leaving Esther to a Hollywood funeral in which an admirer steals her veil.

(June 21, 1937)

In “A Day at the Races,” Groucho Marx washes his hands in a basin, discovers that he has his wrist watch on. He removes it, puts it on a table, notices a bystander eyeing it. He puts it back in the basin,

Says: "I'd rather have it rusty than missing."

Jokes like this, peculiar to the Marx Brothers, are somehow as funny on the screen as they are unfunny in print. A Day at the Races, which took a year to make, is happily distinguished from previous Marx

Pictures in that it contains more of them. A wild, complex, totally implausible fable about a run down sanatorium, its impudent porter (Chico), an imported horse- doctor-physician (Groucho) and the steeplechase in which a speechless jockey (Harpo) gets the money to pay off the sanatorium's debts through his brilliant ride on a horse who hates the gambler who is trying to buy the sanatorium for use as a

Casino--it all adds up to nothing at all except superlative entertainment. A gag sequence omitted but photographed for advertising purposes was one in which Horse-Doctor Groucho plied his trade on a

Horse that fitted perfectly into the Marx family.

(December 27, 1937)

Released this week was the latest Disney venture, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the most ambitious animated cartoon ever attempted. It took Disney's many hands over three years to make. Snow White, like Mickey Mouse, was a creature of necessity. After sound came whopping in, Disney needed a character to replace silent Oswald the Rabbit. From a night of heavy thinking in an upper berth in 1928, Mickey Mouse was born. When the bulging double-feature movement began three years ago to crows out the Disney shorts, Disney resolved to enter the feature field himself.

Few changes have been made in the Grimm story. The dwarfs have been developed until each has character of his own--that of Dopey so unexpectedly heart-winning that Disney may use the mute, youngest dwarf in a series of his own. Wood creatures have been animated with the same type of clever personalities that birds and animals acquire in the Disney shorts. Songs, dialogue in verse, dialogue in prose and silent sequences with incidental sound and music have been worked into a harmonious pattern. Catchiest tune: Hi-Ho, as the dwarfs trudge home from work.

Skeptical Hollywood, that had wondered whether a fairy story could have enough suspense to hold an audience through seven reels, and whether, even if the plot held up, an audience would care about the fate of characters that were just drawings, was convinced that Walt Disney had done it again. Snow White is an exciting as a Western, as funny as a haywire comedy. It combines the classic idiom of folklore drama with rollicking comic-strip humor. A combination of Hollywood, the Grimm Brothers, and the sad,

Searching fantasy of universal childhood, it is an authentic masterpiece, to be shown in theaters and

Beloved by new generations long after the current crop of Hollywood stars, writers and directors are sleeping where no Prince's kiss can wake them.

The following bits of information come from "LIFE" CD;

BILLBOARD MUSICAL HITS OF 1937

1. Sweet Leilani Bing Crosby

2. Once In A While Tommy Dorsey

3. Dipsy Doodle Tommy Dorsey

4. Boo Hoo Guy Lombardo

5. It Looks Like Rain In Cherry Blossom Lane Guy Lombardo

6. Goodnight My Love Benny Goodman

7. The Moon Got In My Eyes Bing Crosby

8. September In The Rain Guy Lombardo

9. That Old Feeling Shep Fields

10. Whispers In The Dark Bing Crosby

OTHER THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN 1937

German bombers pound Guernica. Neville Chamberlain replaces Stanley Baldwin a British Prime Minister. Stalin's "Show Trials" begin in Moscow. Iraq's dictator Sidqi assassinated. Pencay incident escalates tension between Japan, Britain, and USA. Amelia Earhart disappears during Pacific flight from New Guinea to Howland Island on July 2. Britain signs naval agreements with USSR, Germany. George VI crowned King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Farm foreclosure crisis. FDR signs US Neutrality Act. Supreme Court rules for women's wage laws.

Chicago steel workers strike. Golden Gate Bridge opens. Lincoln Tunnel opens. Drought ends. Spam introduced. First "Knock Knock" jokes. First automatic transmissions. Nylon invented. First blood banks. First shopping carts. War Admiral wins Kentucky Derby.

Yankees continue World Series win streak. Lou Gehrig takes screen test for "Tarzan". Joe Louis wins world heavyweight title. Don Budge from USA wins Wimbleton. Army football team beats Navy 6-0. Ohio River flooded. Churchhill Downs racetrack waterlogged. Floods from upper Ohio to Mississippi River. Floods destroyed homes in Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri and in Arkansas. 25 Millionth Ford rolls off assembly line. "Letters to The Editor” column first appeared in Life Magazine January 25, 1937. Fifty hurt in California cannery strike May 6, 1937 was day that the Hindenburg crashed and burned in Lakehurst N.J.

First Bugs Bunny cartoon came out, "Porky's Hare Hunt" Greta Garbo starred with Robert Taylor and Lionel Barrymore in "Camille" U.S. Astronomer Grote Reber invented the world's first radio telescope that mapped high frequency. He was only 25 at the time. Japanese attacked Peking on July 28. Harold S. Vanderbuilt built and skippered the "Ranger" to win the America's cup. F.D.R. appointed Hugo Black to the Supreme Court. "Newsweek" began publication in New York. Pepperdine University was founded in California. Gene Tierney starred with John Lund and Thelma Ritter in "The Mating Season"

The above mentioned are just some things that happened the year I was born, 1937. As we go on, I will put some other world events in that happened in other years. Perhaps this will jog other memories of the readers.

Chapter 2

Sometime in early 1938, my family moved from Sherman Texas to Fort Worth, Texas. They told me that my uncle, Bill Robbins, had left Sherman for Fort Worth where he started a small hamburger business. Uncle Bill urged the rest of the Robbins family, and my family, to move to Fort Worth. My father went to work in Kincaid's grocery store on the west side of Fort Worth. They told me that my uncle, Johnny Robbins (my mother's brother) also worked at the same store as a butcher. Since I was only two years old, I have to rely on stories I was told by other people. I wish I had started this before my mother died so that I could be more accurate. An interesting side note to this is, Kinkaid's was listed in the Fort Worth phone book as late as 2004 as a grocery store and a hamburger restaurant. Their web page said “Established in 1946“, but I know that it had to be before that, because by 1946, my dad had been a dental technician for many years. Also, my uncle Johnnie had worked there before WW II.

Johnnie D. Robbins at Kincaid’s Grocery Store

I can remember a few things about those days on the west side. My wife says that I can remember every meal. That's an exaggeration, but I do remember some, so I will relate them here. My family used to eat a lot of beans. I remember we had Van Camp's Pork and Beans in a can. We sometimes ate them straight out of the can. I also remember vanilla ice cream and vanilla wafers. Dad used to bring home a pint of ice cream almost every day during the warm weather. They probably gave him a discount since he worked at the grocery store.

My mother said I first walked at nine months old, but after falling down, I wouldn't walk again until I was almost two years old. To hear my mother tell it, I was chubby and a little lazy. She also said I was very "hard headed," to use her words. She often told the story of how I insisted we have "red beans" for supper. I demanded them late in the day, so there was no time to cook them. Since I could not understand how long it takes to cook beans, I just couldn't understand why Mother was so mean and wouldn't cook them. When Dad came home from work, Mother told him to do something about my demands. He couldn't reason with me so he "whipped" me. In those days, they called a spanking a whipping and it was not child abuse. After the "whipping," they sent me to the bathroom to cool off. Mother said that after about 30 minutes of crying, she asked if I was ready to come out of the bathroom and I said, "Yes, but I still want some beans!"

For entertainment, my family would walk a few blocks to "Montgomery Wards" to do what they called "window shopping." This was cheap entertainment. I remember that in the summer when we went the grass was fresh cut and I think there were water sprinklers there because the grass was always wet and cool. I also enjoyed trying to catch the many large frogs, (at least they seemed large to me at the time). Mother always told me that if a frog "pee'ed" on me I would get warts. I didn't know what warts were, nevertheless, I knew what "pee" was and I didn't want to risk that, so I usually left the frogs alone.

Thinking about my alleged "laziness" I remember mother telling about a trip she and I made to Montgomery Ward's store one day in the summer. I would assume it was about 1940. She said it was very hot and I decided I didn't want to walk. Since she was carrying some packages and it was very hot, she couldn't carry me. She said, she would put down the packages and carry me to a spot, put me down and go back for the packages. She said she repeated that process for a few blocks, then a young boy came down the street riding a bicycle and my mother paid him 25 cents to take me home on his bicycle.

Sometime in the late 30's, my grandfather, (Lamb) took my father and I up for my first airplane ride. I don't remember it, but I was told the story many times. It seems that there was a "barnstormer" that landed in a field near my grandfather’s farm near Sherman, Texas. This may have been the start of another love of my life, flying. I've had so many interests that I had to let some of them go in order to pursue the others.

Over the years, I have wanted to be a pilot, medical doctor, musician, photographer, detective, spy, and other things I can't even remember. About the only thing I've done with success is photography. I've done a little of all the things I've wanted to do.

Somewhere around the latter part of 1941, my dad bought a small lot in White Settlement, a small town about 8 miles west of Fort Worth. Dad tore down some old buildings and used the wood to build a small house on Raymond Street. The last time I was in the area, September 2004, the house was still there. I seem to remember, "Helping" him build it. This is where my mother first started curling my hair. She used a curling iron that she heated on a wood stove in the bedroom. I also remember the electric cord that hung from the ceiling and on the end of it was one bare bulb. I wished my mother would let me grow up and not have to sleep in a baby bed. I was almost five years old and I thought it was terrible my mother curled my hair and made me sleep in a baby bed with the sides up.

This was about the time I got my first bad injury. My dad was still working on the new house and he had left a board with some nails in it beside the back door. My aunt Lucille (Mothers sister) and my (maternal) grandmother lived nearby. One day I decided to go out the back door and cross the field to visit them. This part of my memory is as vivid today as it was when it happened. I fell and the nails went straight into my right knee. The pain was terrible and it scarred me for life. The scars are still there, almost 65 years later. This was just the first of many accidents and scars.

While living here, there was another incident that both my mother and grandmother told on me. It seems that Grandmother was watching me at our house on Raymond Street when I decided I wanted to go see my Aunt "Cile." As I started out the back door, Grandmother told me to stop and asked where I was going. I said, "I'm goin to aunt Teels." She said, "No. You're not!" and at this I said, "I am too, I'm a Lamb!" And she said, "I don't care if you're a billy-goat, you're not going anywhere!"

My aunt Lucille was married to Austin Moffitt and they lived in a house just across a back lot, to our southwest. Their house was at 120 Ralph Street. Raymond Street, where we lived, ran east and west and crossed Ralph Street. My uncle Austin built their house and a friend built one very similarly next door on their south side at 116 Ralph. The lots were one acre each. Both 116 and 120 Ralph belong to my family to this day. My Brother Stephen Austin Lamb lives at 116 Ralph and his son, Stephen John lives next door at 120 Ralph. I have also lived there (120) twice and so has my mother. She owned it until she gave it to my nephew before she died.

When I was just about five years old, I remember visiting there and playing with my cousins, Billy Austin Moffitt and Linda May Anne Moffitt. It was at this house that Linda had her first major accident. A screen door spring broke loose and caught her in the mouth ripping a large hole in her tongue. I also have some good memories about that house. I remember that in the summer time Linda and I played under a large grape arbor on the back yard. Aunt Cile would make us iced tea and put mint in it that she grew in the back yard. Many years later when I was living there with my wife, son and daughter, I would mow the grass and I could still smell the mint that had grown there for so many years. Maybe my nephew can still smell it today as he mows that same spot.

Another fond memory of that place is when the Moffitts lived there. They had an old icebox and I remember aunt Cile used to put a square card in the window that told the iceman how much ice she wanted that day. Each side of the card had a number, 100, 75, 50, and 25. The iceman would see which side of the card was up and took that amount into the house and put it in the icebox. Of course, there was never a lock on the door, so all he had to do was leave the ice in the icebox in the kitchen. If no one was home, he would leave a bill and collect at a different time.

Meals at the Moffitt house were very memorable also. Uncle Austin was a butcher and always had great meat. Aunt Cile always had meat for all meals. Breakfast always had either sausage or bacon. Dinner (the noon meal) always had some kind of meat and supper usually had steak or roast. When she cooked bacon, she would always save the fat and used it in other dishes. Uncle Austin’s favorite salad was lettuce, tomatoes and bacon with hot bacon fat poured all over the salad. It was called wilted lettuce salad.

A smell is a good memory jogger. Every time I smell coal burning, I can remember either my aunt's house or a train. The smell really gets a memory going. The Moffitts burned coal. I think my family used wood only, but I'm not sure. I suspect coal was not the most common thing to use for heat in those days in Texas, because I only remember my aunt's coal stove. I have many other memories about this house, but since I am trying to stay in chronological order, I will save those thoughts for a later segment.

Somewhere around early 1941 someone offered my dad a much better job and a chance to leave the grocery business. The way he told it was that a customer used to deal with him at the store and the customer liked Dad a lot. This man owned a dental lab and he told my dad that he had been watching the way Dad used his hands and he thought he would make a good dental technician. Dad was flattered and so he took him up on his offer to teach him to make false teeth.

The pay must have been a lot better, because it was not long before we were moving into a new house at 3017 Baedeker Street in Fort Worth. To us, this was moving on up.



In those days everyone had his picture made on a pony from a traveling photographer. This is beside our house in Poly at 3017 Baedeker St.

In late November 1942, my sister, Paula Jane, was born. I remember she had very black hair and cried a lot. The next memory that comes to mind in that house was on December 8, 1942. I was lying on the bed in the back bedroom with my new sister and my mother. Mother just picked up the newspaper and opened it to see the startling news about the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7. I guess it was the first we had heard about it. It was very scary for Mother and she read to me what happened. Just about that time, something large and loud hit the side of the house. I thought the Japanese, just like Pearl Harbor, had bombed our house. Mother assured me that it was just something natural and I didn't have to worry. I remember I was very scared.

I always loved to visit my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in Sherman. Some of the things I would do when I went there was play with my uncle, Joe Donald. He was only nine months older than I was. We would go to the cotton field near the house and “build” a small “town” in the dirt on the edge of the field. We had a lot of toy cars and trucks. We would make our buildings out of boxes. It was during WW II and there were many quanset huts in use. We made our quanset huts by cutting oatmeal boxes in half.

My paternal grandmother, whom we called Grandma, was a great cook. Some of the things I remember were; fried chicken, biscuits, gravy, mashed potatoes, corn and a few unusual things. She made us treats by pouring pure fresh cream over bread and sprinkling sugar on top. She also made a cake from scratch that was always the same, but tasted great. Grandma cooked on a wood stove and it seems she always had it going. Even in warm weather, she had it going to cook for us.

Grandma was a collector of oddities and rocks. Shortly before she died in 1980, she showed me the first rock she ever collected. She kept that rock in her purse most of her life. When she died, the family put her rock collection on her grave. Another thing she used to do was to put colored glass in the wood stove and melt it into different shapes. Some of the glass would be used to make her “curiosity jars.” These were glass jars she would cover with glaziers putty and stick small bits of oddly shaped melted glass and other small odd things in the soft putty on the jars.

Another thing Grandma did was to paint. I never thought they were any good. When the famous painter, Grandma Moses became popular, I realized that they had about the same talent. It was too bad my Grandma was not as successful at selling her paintings.

Grandma was an outstanding person with a lot of stories. When she came to Texas, she came with her father in a covered wagon. When she was very young, she was captured by the Indians and taken into Indian Territory across the Red River. That area is now known as Oklahoma, but then it was named, “Indian Territory.” A group of farmers and cowboys went after the Indians and got her back. Another story Grandma told was something that happened to her in her later years.

She had a daughter, Maudine Snellings that lived in Arkansas. Grandma went to visit her once, sometime in the “50’s” and when she had a layover in Muskogee Oklahoma, she was in the bus station and a man came up to her and asked if she was Maude. She said, “Yes, but how do you know?” He said he had known her a few years earlier there in Muskogee. Grandma said, she had never lived there before. She and the man did some checking and found someone who knew the Maude that he had known. They managed to find her and found out that the Maude he knew and my Grandmother were half sisters. They found out that after my Great grandfather left Grandma in Sherman Texas with some people named Jourdan, he went to Oklahoma, married again and had another daughter he named Maude. So, after she was grown and raised a family herself, found a half sister with the same name in Oklahoma.

Another story she told was that she was a passenger on the first jet aircraft to fly to California. That’s quite contrast to go from riding in a covered wagon to a jet aircraft.

I remember some things about the old farmhouse near Sherman. It was on top of a hill facing north. There were some “chinaberry” trees in the front yard. My aunts and Grandma would string the berries to make necklaces from them. There was a large metal tank about three feet off the ground behind the house. It was used to collect water off the roof and that was one source of water. They also had a well with a pulley and bucket to draw up a cool drink of water. Grandma and the girls would wash clothes in a large black kettle in the back yard. They kept a fire going to keep the water hot and she used lye soap to wash with. There was a large smoke house where they smoked meat and it hung there until they needed it.



This is the Lamb family at the old farmhouse about 1939 or 1940 they are (left to right back row); Maude Ellen, (my grandmother), Mary, Gene, John (Daddy), Lillian Mae, Clyde and Robert Newton (my grandfather) and Joe Donald. Front row; Glen, Carl, Maudine and Vernon.

They had pigs, cows, horses and chickens. Some of the chickens were Rhode Island Reds and some were Barred Plymouth Rocks. Grandma would pick out a nice young one, wring its neck, clean, and fry it for dinner. For a special Sunday dinner, she would kill one or two large chickens and bake them in the old wood stove. Those were really special days, but they were to change soon. My grandfather, Robert Newton Lamb had skin cancer on his face and he was very tired and weak. He would die soon, in the winter of 1942 or 1943. I don’t remember seeing him anywhere but in his bed in the back of the old farmhouse. They didn’t have electricity, so kerosene lamps lighted the place. I didn’t know the name of the fuel was kerosene, because they all called it “coal oil.” They pronounced it as one word, “kolall”.

Although they had no electricity, they had a radio that was powered by large storage batteries. I don’t know how those batteries were charged, but they were large and had battery acid in them and the kids were warned to stay a long way away from them. We didn’t know what would happen if we got near them, but we were afraid to find out.

One cold snowy winter night my family was asleep in our warm house in Fort Worth and a telegram arrived that said Granddaddy was either dieing or had just died. Daddy put us all in the old Model T Ford and we headed out north to Sherman. It was cold and snowing. Mom heated some bricks on the stove, wrapped them in blankets, and put them in the car. We all used those warm bricks and blankets to keep warm. In those days, cars did not have heaters. My sister was a very young baby and Mom was afraid she would get sick.

Mom said that Daddy got so cold, he would stop and run up and down the highway get his circulation going. When we got to the old farmhouse near Sherman, Granddaddy was dead. We stayed there until after the funeral.

 

This was on the farm shortly before they moved to town

Shortly after Granddaddy died, Grandma and some of her boys moved to town. They moved to 517 North Maple, not far from the hospital where I was born. Sometimes while visiting there, Joe and I would walk down the railroad track out of town and pick blackberries. We then took them to Grandma who would make us a blackberry cobbler.

We did some things back then are considered very dangerous today. Some things we did then would get a kid committed to a hospital today. One thing that was dangerous was playing with mercury. I’m not sure where we got it, but I think we bought it at a drug store. It was fun to let it roll around in the palm of our hands. We also put some in an empty capsule and that made what we called “Mexican jumping beans.” With a couple of drops of mercury in a capsule, it would jump all over your hands when it moved. That was great fun and we did it for hours. I don’t know how we kept from getting mercury poisoning. We also rubbed it into other coins for a great silver shine.

Another dangerous thing we did was to make gunpowder. We bought saltpeter and Sulphur at a drug store. We then burned some wood and ground up the charcoal and mixed the three ingredients together to make gunpowder. I don’t remember the proportions, but we never got it right for a big explosion. We made a lot of small bombs, but never got the results we wanted.

I would visit there many times, mostly in the summer. One summer, my Uncle Vernon was delivering ice in a horse drawn wagon, and he took my uncle Joe and I along with him. I remember those large pieces of ice being made. They were 300-pound blocks that were scored in 25-pound segments. We would use an ice pick to cut the large blocks into 100-pound pieces and Vernon would load them onto the wagon. We then rode around town in that wagon and sold ice to the homeowners. We had a specific route because no one could handle all the ice orders alone. Very few people had refrigerators in those days, so almost everyone bought ice.

Another fun memory in the summer was the “Old Settlers Picnic”. This was sort of like a county fair with rides, games, carnival booths, canning and cooking contests. It was held at the “Old Settlers Park”. A recent inquiry has determined that the park is still there, but the picnic is no longer held.



This sometime in the early 40’s at the Lamb house on Maple Street. Left to right are Front row; Me and Joe Donald Back row; Dad, Carl, Gene and Glen. Glen and I are the only ones in this picture alive in 2005 and we last met in Hilo Hawaii in January 2005 for the first time since 1985

Chapter 3

Starting School

September 1943 started a new era in my life. I started school. Mother took me to D. McRay Elementary School in the Poly Area of Fort Worth and enrolled me in the first grade. We didn't have kindergarten then. The first day at school was a scary experience for me. While Mother was still in the room, I was told to sit in a certain seat, which I did. Then suddenly with no warning, I stood up and crowed like a rooster. The class laughed and my career as a class clown had been launched.

School in the 40's was different. We had to learn something about war. Part of our class was to look at and learn to identify aircraft from books of silhouettes of warplanes. We also learned about rationing. During World War II, almost everyone was involved. Little school children had to help by collecting aluminum, tin foil, paper, etc. As soon as we could write, we sent letters to military men in the war. They rationed many things, such as; sugar, gas, rubber, and certain kinds of foods. They told us that we must eat everything on our plates because "little children overseas are starving." We didn't want to be responsible for killing a child overseas, so we ate everything. Maybe that's why so many in my generation grew up overweight.

There were many "drives" which were a way to get everyone involved in the war effort. I remember seeing a very large pile of pots and pans piled up in front of the Tarrant County Courthouse. They told us that all those aluminum pans would be melted down and made into warplanes. We also collected what we called "tinfoil." I think it was aluminum foil and it was also used in the war effort. We didn’t let any go to waste. We took it off cigarette packages and chewing gum wrappers. We had to carefully peel the foil from the wrappers and save it in balls.

Sometimes at night, we would hear a siren and a civil defense warden, wearing a helmet would come around to all the houses and make sure there were no lights visible outside. We had to either turn off all the lights or pull down some very dark shades. The idea was that an enemy plane might be flying over and we were supposed to make sure he couldn't see us. I don't believe any enemy planes got within 300 miles of us, but we were not taking any chances. On bright moonlit nights, we were especially fearful that we might be seen from the air and on those bright nights searchlights scanned the skies constantly. In Galveston, about 300 miles away, there was evidence of enemy action. Dummy warships, made from plywood and cardboard were put on barges and left floating in the Gulf of Mexico, just off the Texas Coast. Sometimes in the morning, these "ships” had holes shot in them from the enemy.

Once while visiting my grandparents in White Settlement, I remember seeing a large wall being raised erect at what was to be called the "Bomber Plant." This was the factory just down the street from where I used to live and near where my grandparents lived at that time. The factory went up very fast and started turning out B-24 bombers that went straight into the war. I thought that prefabricated building was really something. An immense building had an assembly line to turn out those bombers. As late as 2004, there were warplanes still being built there. Different aircraft manufacturers have been there since the beginning.

Soon after the factory started working on those bombers, the government put up a group of apartments called "Liberator Village." It was named for the B-24 "Liberator." Each apartment building looked like a long concrete box and contained three to four apartments. I think they were originally put up for workers at the "Bomber Plant," but at one point, they were open to other people. A few blocks away, the government started another phase to the housing project. These apartments were not as well built. They were smaller and instead of concrete blocks, they were of wood frame construction. I think they were prefabricated and the outside looked like army barracks with gray asbestos siding. They also built a school from the same materials. I later went to that school when we moved to White Settlement.

Although there was a war going on, we lived in a much more peaceful time than we lived in many years later, after World War II. Now in the 21st. century, children are not allowed to walk a long distance to go to school, but then we all walked to and from school. We had bullies then, but I don't think they were dangerous as they are today. I had to walk about eight blocks to school when I was in the first and second grade at D. McRay School. One day while walking home from school, two bullies drug me behind a large billboard and stole my clothes. I waited until almost dark to leave. Was I surprised to find my clothes not more than 30 feet away? I dressed and went home; probably crying, I don't remember, but I tell you for sure I was mad.

This was about the time I started my love affair with what is now (2005) known as big bands. We used to listen to them on the radio in the living room. Our radio was a console about three feet tall with a record player in the top of it, and we had a pretty good collection of records. The only records we had were 78 rpm, but our record player had a switch for 33 1/3 rpm records, although I had never seen one. The old 78 rpm records were very delicate and they would break easily. My sister, Paula broke some and I was very upset at her.

Some of my favorite orchestras were; Glen Miller, Benny Goodman, Harry James, and of course, those fabulous Dorseys. Some of my favorite singers were; Mills Brothers, Bing Crosby, Peggy Lee, The Andrews Sisters, and The Ink Spots. I also liked a couple of western Swing bands, Spade Cooley and Bob Wills. There was also Spike Jones, a comedy/novelty act. The "Billboard Hits" of 1943 were; 1. “I've Heard That Song Before" with Harry James, 2. "Paper Doll" by The Mills Brothers, 3. "Pistol Packin Momma" with Al Dexter, 4. "Sunday, Monday, Or Always" with Bing Crosby, 5. You'll Never Know" with Dick Haymes, 6."There Are Such Things" with Tommy Dorsey, 7."CComing In On A Wing And A Prayer” with The Song Spinners, 8. "In The Blue Of The Evening" with Tommy Dorsey, and 10. "Let's Get Lost" with Vaughn Monroe.

At the end of the block where we lived on Baedeker Street, there was a mailbox that my mother used to send me to post mail. It seemed the box was very high and I could barely reach it. Years later, I tried to find that giant mailbox and I discovered it to be only average height of about four feet high.

Another memory I have of that place was the nearby "mom & pop" grocery store. It was only about a block and a half away and my mother would send me there to "Moore's Grocery" to get grocery items she needed from time to time. Mr. Moore liked me and was always very nice to me. We had an account there, I would go get whatever Mother wanted, and then one day I got the idea to get something for myself. I liked candy like most kids, so I would get myself a "Baby Ruth" or "Chicken Bone." I also liked a candy made from coconut that was thin and had pink and white stripes of very sweet coconut candy. This deal was cut short after my father paid the weekly bill and found out what I was doing. From that time on, I had to have a note from my mother or father before Mr. Moore would give me any candy.

Since my father was in the dental business, he was considered necessary to the war effort and he did not have to go to war. This was not the case for my uncles, who did have to go to war. My uncle Carl, My father's brother, joined the Navy, but got rheumatic fever and was discharged. My father got him a job making dentures and he stayed with us for a while at the house on Baedeker. He used to listen to the radio a lot and I listened with him. We loved music and situation comedies. My family used to sit around and listen to the radio almost every night. Some of our favorites were; Fibber Magee and Mollie, Red Skelton, Bob Burns, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. We also liked mystery shows like “FBI”, “The Shadow”, “Intersanctum” and of course, we always listened to the news.

One day while listening to the radio, we were all shocked to hear of President Roosevelt's death. I can remember many people crying and saying what a shame it was. FDR was disliked by many, but very much loved by the majority. He died April 12, 1945, not long before the end of World War II.

I mentioned my uncle Carl going into the Navy. I also had other uncles go into the military during WWII. Amazingly enough, they all came back. On my dad's side, Vernon went to the Army and fought in Europe. He later was discharged because of frozen feet. Uncle Gene went into the Army and was stationed in Hawaii. On my mother’s side, I also had uncles go to war. My uncle Johnny went to the Army and fought in Asia. My uncle Joe Robbins went into the Navy and fought the battle of Grand Prairie, Texas. The war was over before he was shipped overseas.



Liberator Village. The housing area built in White Settlement during WWII to house the workers at the aircraft factory known as The Bomber Plant. The name Liberator Village was so named for the B24 bomber the plant was built to manufacture. The darker buildings were masonry and where we lived. The light colored were the asbestos sided apartments and the school I went to in the second grade up until the 8th grade.

Chapter 4

When I was about seven years old, I started showing symptoms of a disease that would plague me for the rest of my life. I had been sick before, but not as bad. When I was in the second grade at D. McRay elementary school, I was so sick with that disease, asthma that I was in the hospital many times. Because I missed so much school, my teacher told my mother that she suggested I repeat the second grade. My mother agreed, so I failed the second grade and that was something that really bothered me, I thought I was a failure. From then on, I was usually the oldest in my class.

We moved the summer of 1945. My father bought a house at Lake Worth, on a high bluff overlooking the lake. It seemed like a great place for a boy to grow up. I picked wild grapes and tried to sell them to the people going down the road. Dad built a dock out into the lake and he bought a very fancy inboard motorboat. I guess he was doing well at work. This new place to live made me forget about my school failure. My father bought me a Daisy air rifle and that also made me feel better. Unfortunately, that same air rifle caused me a lot of pain too. I was aggravating my little sister one day and she picked up that air rifle and shot out my front tooth.

My favorite breakfast cereal was “Kellogs Pep”. They used to put offers on the boxes for things kids would love to have. I remember sending in many box tops and getting things like “secret decoder” rings and once I sent in enough box tops to get a “propeller” beanie. That was one of my prized possessions and I wore it all the time that summer.

On August 15th.1945 Japan surrendered and World War II was over. We had a large bell in front of that house at Lake Worth and I rang it that night for a long time. It just seemed too good to be true, I was not sick, we lived at a great place and the war was over. My Aunt Roxie was with us and I remember how happy she was to hear about the surrender, because her husband, Uncle Johnnie D. Robbins would be coming home soon. He was in the Army fighting somewhere in the Pacific, as mentioned earlier.

I don't know what made us move from the lake I loved so much. It could have been because, while walking in my sleep, my father caught me walking off the deep end of the dock into Lake Worth. Incidentally, I could not swim. At any rate, Dad sold the house and boat and we moved.

I think it was the summer of 1946 or early summer 1946, That Daddy took Aunt Roxie and us on a vacation to Galveston Texas. Daddy had a friend there that he used to work with at a dental lab. His friend was a medical student at the university in Galveston.

 

Our family with Aunt Roxie in Galveston

We went to the university to see Daddy’s friend one night. He was studying anatomy at the anatomy lab. Mother and Roxie stayed in the car because they were afraid of the place. Daddy took Paula and me inside. You might think we would be afraid of that place, but we were not afraid. At least I was not afraid. The man asked Daddy if we wanted a tour and we said, yes. He led us into a long cavernous room full of long tables about six feet apart , except for the center of the room, where there was a display of large jars filled with liquid and some specimens.

On each table was a cadaver. Some were covered and some were not. The tables where the cadavers were uncovered had a light over the table and some students gathered around dissecting the bodies.

Daddy’s friend took us to a table where his friends were cutting a man apart. In those days, most smoked and most of the students were smoking while cutting on the dead man on the table. One student had drilled a hole in the man’s head and he was using that hole to hold his cigarette while he cut. I remember thinking that that was the most unusual ashtray I had ever seen.

We were then taken to the center of the room and shown the large jars. Each jar had a body part or organ in it. There were other large jars with babies in them. Most of the babies had not been born and had their umbilical cords still attached. There was one jar with twins that were still attached to each other.

Daddy’s friend also told us some stories about pranks the students would pull. One I remember was when some of the students decided to go to Mexico for the weekend. When entering Mexico, they had to cross a toll bridge over the Rio Grande. The driver had cut off an arm of a cadaver and took it with them to Mexico. The toll was 10 cents and when they approached the toll taker, they put a dime in the hand of the arm they had brought with them. They stuck out the arm with the dime in it and when the toll taker reached for the dime, they drove off leaving the toll taker holding the arm. They looked back to see the man jumping off the bridge into the Rio Grande. They had a good laugh and drove on. They didn’t know what happened to the toll taker.

That was the first time I had ever seen a dead body, but definitely not my last. I no longer have any interest in seeing dead people. I have thought a lot over the years about that trip to Galveston and the tour of the lab. That might have been the thing that sparked my interests in medicine and science.

After we moved away from Lake Worth, Dad bought an old country church east of Fort Worth. It was summer and very hot, so we had to leave the doors open all night to be able to sleep. One night as I was sleeping on the floor I was awakened by something breathing hard in my face. As my eyes adjusted to dark, I saw that it was a large cow that had wandered into the church and she was standing over me slobbering in my face. My dad saw her and ran her off into the night. I’m glad she didn’t step on me. My mom insisted we move to a real house and we did.

We moved to "liberator Village" in White Settlement, Texas. This is the second time we have lived in this area. We moved into one of those concrete buildings I mentioned earlier. I guess that now the war is over, they could be rented to anyone.

In September of that year, I started to school in that gray prefabricated asbestos covered building in White Settlement. I was not happy about going there, partially because I would be repeating the second grade and partially because they treated me like a younger child by making me take a nap during school and by giving me milk to drink and graham crackers to eat. I still remember those dry graham crackers and I never liked milk. It was as if I were being punished twice for failing the second grade.

Public school at that time was so crowded that they had to have two shifts. It seems that each session was four hours, 7-11 and 12-4. The year I spent in second grade for the second time was not very memorable, but I must have been healthier, because I didn't fail that time. I do remember a few things that happened that year. One was at Christmas time, when I was given some sparklers. What I remember about those sparklers was what I did with them. I set a large field of dead grass on fire. I thought it was really neat to throw the lit sparklers into the air. One airborne lit sparkler went over the house and landed in that field of dead grass. Since it was on the far side of the house, I didn't know it was burning until it was too late to do anything about it. I don't believe anyone ever knew how that field caught fire, until now. The fire department went around asking questions, but I don't think anyone but me knew what happened and I was not going to say anything.

That was the year I first met Jesse Burns. He lived close to us in the older part of Liberator Village. Jesse and I were never very good friends, but I remembered him because he was always so sick, and because of that, I could relate to him.

Another incident that stands out about that year was when I got into a fight with a neighborhood bully. He was getting the best of me when his father stepped out of their apartment and started urging him to beat me up. About this time, my father and mother came out and started an argument with his parents. I seem to remember his father backed down and went inside when my father came out. My mother, on the other hand took on his mother. I'm a little hazy about what happened next, but I think I beat the boy up and my mother beat up his mother and our fathers just tried to break us all up.

Not long after that, my father made a deal to either buy or rent my maternal grandparent's house in White Settlement. I was very happy about moving out of "the village." We were back in a "real" house again. That was on Melrose Street and there are two pictures below that were made in front of that house.

 

The pictures above are in front of our house on Melrose Street in White Settlement. Above right (left to right) Uncle Carl, Dad, Mom and Paula. Lower right ; Paula, Dad and me.

When my Grandparents moved away from Melrose Street, they moved to a farm west of Burleson Texas. My grandfather Robbins was known by the kids as Pop. Grandmother and Pop grew peanuts and cotton. They also had pigs, chickens, and cows. When I visited there, I learned new things, like how to chop cotton, pick cotton, milk cows, and make butter and how to tend chickens.

Grandmother had the first electric cream separator and an electric butter churn. She also had one of the first home-owned refrigerators. The compressor of the refrigerator was a large round thing on top. With all those modern conveniences Grandmother made money for the family by selling cream, buttermilk, butter and eggs.

Pop did all the farming, except for the cotton chopping and picking. For that, he usually hired some help. Daddy and I worked for him some. We chopped cotton and picked it. There is more about this in the chapter about my work experience.

Some of my memories about this place is that’s where Pop hurt my feelings once. The reason I mentioned this is because it only happened once. One day, I was in the barn and didn’t want to work. Pop called me lazy and that hurt me. He also told me something I have repeated many times. Pop said that a hoe would rust away if it’s not used and people will also “rust” away if they don’t work. I always looked up to Pop, as he was one of my hero’s. I think my chewing tobacco was partly because Pop chewed it. He chewed “Tinsley’s” plug tobacco. Grandmother and her mother, whom we called “Mother Cumby”, dipped snuff until they died. When Grandmother was about 100 years old, she said she tried to stop dipping snuff, but it made her too nervous, so she started again and continued until she died at 103.

While Grandmother and Pop lived there, I got my first camera, and Ansco Panda. I remember using that camera to shoot family members. I photographed my great grandmother, whom we called, Mother Cumby.



This is a shot I made of Mother Cumby at Pop and Grandmother’s farm near Burleson Texas. The quality of this photograph is nothing to brag about, but it’s still the best portrait of Mother Cumby anyone can remember seeing.

Chapter 5

MY BEST FRIEND

When I started the third grade that year, I met Donald "Red" Terry. We were not in the same room, but the same grade. Red, as you might have guessed, had VERY red hair and freckles. He was my best friend, and I don't think we ever had an argument. We were as close as two peas in a pod. The Terrys lived on the same street as we did and they also lived just across the street from my uncle and aunt, Johnnie and Roxie Robbins.

Red and I were so close that we sometimes finished each other’s sentences. We just thought alike. We would go fishing together and often spent the night together in his house, my house or camping out on the creek or wherever. Most of the time we would walk to and from school together.

I remember when I caught my first fish. Red and I were fishing with another friend, Wayne Jeffries. We were fishing with poles, using worms and I caught a large (to me) catfish. It weighed about one pound. Soon after that I caught a turtle.

This was about the time when I got started on my lifelong career. I would mow the grass for our family and others in the neighborhood. When I mowed for our neighbors, they would pay me 50 cents. My parents allowed me to do as I pleased with my money. I usually went to the local drug store and spent that money as soon as I made it. Most of the time I would buy a model airplane. One time I decided to do something different, so I bought a roll of Kodak 620 Verichrome film. I didn't even know what it was; I just saw it on the shelf and said, "I'll take one of those." I went home and asked my mother what it was. She said it was film, but she didn't know any more about it than that. Mother told me to go ask my Aunt Roxie about it. I did and Aunt Roxie told me what it was and even lent me her 620 Eastman Kodak Box camera.

With a camera loaded with fresh film and instructions from my aunt, I set out on a love affair that has lasted more than 58 years at this writing. One of the first shots I made was of a fire truck speeding down our street on its way to a fire. I still remember it vividly. At the time I didn't know what I was doing, but I panned with the fire truck and I got a very good shot of it, showing a lot of action. Anyway, when I mowed more yards and made the money to have the film processed, I remember seeing those first shots and saying, "I want to do this the rest of my life." And that's what I did.

There was a photo studio in White Settlement that I went to and asked for help. The man took me in and for a few years, I spent all my spare time there. But now back to the chronological report of my life.

I was telling about my best friend, "Red" Terry. His real name was Sammy Donald Terry. He had four brothers, Jack and Jerry (twins), Franky and Freddy. Jack was almost white headed and Jerry looked like Don with red hair and freckles. Franky was a lot like his older brother, Jack, with almost white hair. Freddy was so young, we never played with him.

I was very close to the Terry family. The father was Sam and the mother was Estell. I called her Mom. She was a fine country style cook. Whenever possible, I tried to eat at their house. Her biscuits were legend. They were very large and light. She could also cook fried chicken that would melt in your mouth. My own mother was also a good cook, but I always preferred Mrs. Terry's to Mother's.

Sam Terry gave me one of my first jobs. He opened a laundry and he hired me to help by washing clothes. I don't remember the other boys working there, but I sure did.

There were a lot of memories about my childhood in White Settlement. Some of my friends, besides the Terrys, were Wayne Jeffries, Jimmy Wilson and Jay Shaw. Some of the things we would do together were, fishing, camping, going to the movies and reading comic books. For fishing, we would often go down to the creek that ran behind the Jeffries house and not far from us all. We caught mostly catfish and turtles. We always threw the turtles back, but the catfish were very tasty, especially when Mrs. Terry cooked them for us.

We used to hike or ride our bikes about three miles west of White Settlement and camp out in a place called, "Bobcat Canyon." It seemed at the time to be an extremely long way from home. The last time I was there, sometime in 2002, the place was filled with very expensive houses all through the old canyon. What a loss!

Two camping trips to the canyon stand out in my mind. Once, when we had spent the weekend camping, we were leaving to go home. When we got to the road where we had left our bikes, I looked into the ditch across the road and found a safe. It had been blown open and all the money removed. It was still full of papers and drugs, so we thought we had better report it. Wayne Jeffries had hiked to the canyon, so he didn't have a bike. He told me that since he was the fastest rider, he should use my bike and ride into town and get the police. I agreed, and walked home.

Was I ever mad when I got home to find out Wayne got all the credit and reward from Mr. Matthews at the drug store when he reported the find to the police. He even got his name in the paper. I was mad at him for a long time after that, since I was the one who had found it in the first place.

The other trip that stands out is the one that could have been a tragic one. Little Franky Terry had convinced us to take him along and we took our "BB guns" with us to shoot at whatever turned up. Unfortunately in those days we would shoot birds just for fun. No one ever told us that were wrong. Anyway, someone fired his gun without looking at where he was shooting, and Franky was in the line of fire. The BB went into his temple and he went down. I don't know how deep it was, but we were all scared and we knew we would be in big trouble if our parents found out, so all the boys talked me into digging that shot out of Franky's head. The boys thought I could do it since I was the one who always read encyclopedias and other things they thought was too hard to read. Franky survived my roadside surgery, our parents never found out, and I got interested in medicine.

One summer while we were living in White Settlement, our lives changed again, but it was only temporary. My Mothers aunt, Alice was married to Charlie Spelce and he was a pecan farmer near Byres Texas. Auntie and Uncle Charlie had moved there many years ago from near Sherman. Uncle Charlie had become very successful and had acquired seven farms. Most of them were pecan orchards, but he also grew other crops. It takes a long time to plant pecans and get them up to producing pecans. Uncle Charlie had one tree he called “Old Goldie.” I remember seeing a post card that was a picture of that one tree with one seasons pecans stacked up in front of the tree. The caption on the card said, “150,000 pounds of pecans.”

Uncle Charlie realized he would not live much longer, so he decided he wanted to get as much family around him as possible. Auntie and Uncle Charlie never had any kids or anyone to leave their fortune to. So he decided he needed to plan for his demise. He asked many of the family members to move up to the Byres area and start working the farms. Daddy was the first to take him up on the offer. Daddy told me that Uncle Charlie said that if Daddy would move to one of his farms and work it, he would be paid a salary and when Uncle Charlie died, the farm would be willed to us.

Since Daddy was raised on a farm, he thought that would be a good deal, so we moved to the farm. It was a real change and we didn’t like all of it. Some things were fun for me, but not for Mom. We had no modern conveniences like we had in Fort Worth. Mom missed things like electricity, telephone, indoor bathroom, running water and a place to shop. Byers was about 10 miles away and all they had was a feed store, small grocery store, small drug store and a gas station. If we needed things that were not available in Byres, we had to go to Wichita Falls Texas, which was about 50 miles, or Wahrika Oklahoma, about 35 miles. It was a big thing to go to Wahrika on Saturday night and go to a movie. Saturday night in Wahrika was very loud and exciting. That’s when all the farmers and cowboys would go to town and blow off steam. Wahrika was about three times larger than Byres and had bars, restaurants and a movie theater, as well as gas stations, or as they were known in those days, service stations. There were also feed stores, hardware store and a furniture store. Wahrika was a real “Wild West” town and had about everything an old Western movie town had, except the gun fights.

Mother did not like this life and she convinced Daddy to give it up and move back to the city. One thing that none of us liked was the primitive bath, except maybe Paula, because she fit perfectly in the tub. We had a number 2 washtub we bathed in and Mom heated water on the stove in a couple of buckets of water drawn from the well. Paula and I lived upstairs and I liked it, but before school started, Daddy gave up his dream of being a farm owner and we all moved back to the big city.

After we went back to the city, my uncle Austin moved his family to that old farm and took our place there. Soon, my uncle Johnnie moved there and my Grandparents also moved there.

My literature of choice is informational type literature, like encyclopedias, but I have never been a great reader. I have read very few books completely, but while living there in White Settlement, I remember reading my first book completely. It was “The Red Pony” and one reason I read the whole book was because I had to stay in a bed a long time with a bad reaction to a bee sting. While playing one day I was stung by a Bumble Bee on my foot. It was very painful and my foot swelled up very big. My mother wrapped it in a white cloth soaked in milk. I also had a high fever and it hurt to walk, so I stayed on my bed for a few days reading “The Red Pony”. Many years later, I read “Battle Cry” and “No Time For Sergeants.”

We did some really dangerous things as kids. I remember once our gang went up against another gang at my club house, which was a converted chicken house. My gang was on the inside and the others were outside and we were shooting fence staples at each other. Shooting staples doesn't sound too bad, until you realize how big and sharp they are. They were about two inches long in a "u" shape with two extremely sharp ends. We shot them from a piece of leather tied to an old inner tube that was tied to a wood stock that had a "V" shape. They were shot with such velocity that they would be embedded in the wood of the chicken house.

Another dangerous thing we would do is to shoot at each other with BB guns. I lost another tooth (remember, my sister got the first one) in one of those battles. We were having a war at Wayne Jeffries house down on the creek and I was hiding behind a tree. I raised up to make a shot when I got hit in the mouth. My parents were not happy about that and I had to live with broken teeth for many years. The Air Force repaired some of them a few years later.

The previously mentioned gun battle was the last for me. I realized how dangerous and stupid it was to shoot at each other, whether with staples or guns. I usually tried to stay away from trouble, because I knew and hated pain. There were a few other battles in my life, but a very few. Once in elementary school, I remember a bully getting mad at me for some reason and he stabbed me in the hand with a pencil. My hand got infected and I was getting afraid I would have to tell my mother, but after about a month it started to heal.

My parents used to like to go dancing a lot and when I was about 10 they would take me along with them sometimes. As mentioned earlier, I loved music and jazz was one of my favorite styles. I can remember "jitterbugging" with my mother. We were always a sensation at the bars we went to because we were pretty good. Unfortunately, it usually turned out bad, because Mother would usually have to drive us home when Dad would get too drunk to drive. But Mother and I were so good that a man once gave me a dollar to watch us dance. I remember taking up a collection after that. The next day, I would go to the store and buy something like 100 pieces of bubble gum, or 10 to 15 comic books. Bubble gum was 1 cent and comic books were 10 cents, so I could buy a lot with my dancing collections.

One interest was in flying. I would build models and fly them. Once I sent away for a model that was supposed to teach me to fly. It was a mockup of an aircraft with all the working controls that you could learn what makes a plane fly.

About 1948, I first discovered girls and my first love was a very cute girl in my fifth grade class. I still remember her face and ears, but I forgot her name. Her ear lobes did not hang down, but grew to the side of her face. Now that I think about it, she was not all that good looking and she never knew I existed. I do remember my fifth grade teacher's name. That was Mrs. Gardner. Another girl in that class fell madly in love with me and I hated it. I wanted the girl I mentioned earlier, but I liked the blond that fell for me, but only as a friend. It hurt me to turn her off because it hurt her feelings and I sure didn't want that either. This was the first of a long line of romantic disappointments for me.

I went to school at the old White Settlement School on the corner of Cherry Lane and White Settlement Road. Just to the south of the school was a store that might have been called a general store. It had groceries, hardware, and toys. We were allowed to go to the store during recess and get school supplies and candy or whatever. This was in 1948, and in 1995, my brother, Steve got that building and ran a large music store in it until he sold it in 1997.

We always loved the summers and we spent a lot of time fishing, camping and going to the movies. Leonard Brothers Department Store in Fort Worth would set up a movie projector and screen in a field near the school and showed free movies every Saturday night. We also went to the Saturday matinee at the Village Theater every Saturday morning. There we would watch shows like the Bowery Boys series, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, John Wayne and those serials, like Flash Gordon, or Lash Larue.

In the summer of 1949, I started to work for my Uncle Bill Robbins. My Grandfather, A.G.Robbins, and I would ride the Fort Worth City Bus from White Settlement to Fort Worth and transfer to the Poly bus that took us to Rosedale Street and Poly Hardware. I did all sorts of work there at the store. One job I remember well was pipe cutting and threading. It was a very dirty job, so I did most of that kind of work that summer. I also hated loading feed. The feed was 100 pounds and it was all I could do to lift it.

It was nice to get to go to work with my grandfather, who we called "Pop". I worked off and on for many summers for Uncle Bill Robbins in his hardware store and later in his feed store. I remember my favorite lunches were at the diner next to the hardware store. It seems that I always ordered the same thing, grilled cheese and coffee. I usually drank "Cokes" most of the time, but I ordered coffee for lunch because "Pop" always drank coffee and I wanted to be grown up like him.

Sometime in 1949 while I was in the sixth grade in White Settlement my parents moved to River Oaks and I started in school there. I hated it. They made me play softball, something I had no interest in. It's not clear how I managed it, but somehow I checked myself out of that school and into White Settlement School. My parents didn't know what I was doing, but every morning, I would get up early and hitchhike to White Settlement to go to school. Sometimes I would spend the night with the Terrys and I slept in Sam Terry's old Model A coupe. I even put plants in there and called it my home. The old car didn't run, so Sam let me stay there sometimes.

My parents never did find out about my school situation, as far as I know. Then it got easier when my parents moved back to White Settlement. We moved into my Grandparents house at 120 Ralph. My asthma had started to get bad again and I began to lose weight. I got down very skinny and stayed that way for about six years. By the time I had started the 7th. Grade, I was sick a lot. The doctor tried penicillin and that was very bad, because I was allergic to it. I thought I would die and was told that it could kill me if I took any more penicillin. So I have not been able to take penicillin for the rest of my life. I have had some diseases that could have been cured by penicillin if I had not been allergic to it. At least three times I have had to be hospitalized because of my allergy to penicillin.

Photography has been a large part of my life and by now I was doing photography and selling it to fellow students to make extra money. I got my first training at Nevils Studio in White Settlement Texas. Mr. Nevil took me in and taught me a lot about photography. One memorable experience was when I was learning to develop film. The first assignment Mr. Nevil gave to do all on my own was to develop some film for a customer. He taught me how important it was to make sure it was done right. I had to go into a totally dark room, unroll the film and separate the film from the paper backing. Then attach it to a bar with a series of clips on the top of the bar. I then clipped weighted clips on the bottom of the roll. Then I would set the timer and dip the whole thing in a large tank about six feet deep. In those days, the processing cycle was quite long and I needed to go to the bath room before I was given the assignment. I was so proud that I was given the assignment that I didn’t mention I needed to go to the bathroom first.

Needless to say, I was hurting before I finished the film. I knew how important it was to finish the processing before I went to the bathroom. The only thing I could do was to “wet my pants”, so that’s what I did. To keep from looking stupid before Mr. Nevil, I “accidentally” spilled hypo on my pants. Later I managed to buy some darkroom equipment and set up a darkroom in the garage at home.

When I think back on it, I don’t think I would trust a pre-teen with a customer’s film. Remember there were many things that could go wrong. Everything was done in total dark. The only thing you could see was the dial of the timer and it didn’t put out any light.

Mr. Nevil taught me all he could and said I needed to continue my training in a photography school. He suggested Tech High in Fort Worth and that’s were I went when I was old enough.

Chapter 6

While going to White Settlement School, I started chewing tobacco. I think I started because my Grandfather chewed and I wanted to be just like him. One day while in class, I was chewing and spitting out the window. Some of my friends thought that was really special that I chewed tobacco and they asked for some. It was their first time and they did well as long as they could spit out the window. It was a cool day and our teacher shut the windows. The boys opened the windows to spit and they got in trouble with the teacher. I could hold it, but they decided to swallow it and they got very sick, very fast.

Another thing I did in those days was to smoke Green Mountain Asthma Compound at school. This was a medication for asthma sufferers. It could be smoked in a dish and inhaled, but the best was to smoke it in a pipe. The Principal thought that was bad for me to smoke it in the school, so weather permitting, he told me to go outside and smoke.

Many years later, I found out that Green Mountain Asthma Compound smelled just like marijuana, so I am not so sure they were not the same. Maybe that’s the reason it’s not sold in drug stores anymore. After searching the internet, I can not find anything on it except antique ads.

I also discovered the freedom of bus riding and hitchhiking. I often went to Fort Worth and spent a lot of time there. Some of my favorite activities there were going to movies and spending a lot of time in record stores listening to music. People today would be surprised to hear that we would always listen to records before we bought them. I seldom bought them, but I listened to them for hours. The record department of Striplings Department Store had many soundproof booths just big enough for one or two people to listen to a record before we bought them. I would buy maybe one a week just so I wouldn't get run off.

Another fun thing was to go to 12th. Street and Main in Fort Worth and there was the "Liberty Theater" and that was one of my favorite places. Another thing I loved about that area was the "Penny Arcade."

The "Penny Arcade" had a lot of machines I loved. Many of them would work for a penny, hence the name. One of my favorites was the movie machine. A person would look down into a viewer and put in a penny. Then he would turn the crank on the side and a light would come on and a large number of photographs would flip by giving the illusion that the subject was moving. If you turned very fast, you would get a speeding horse or stage coach, or whatever. If you cranked slow, you would get a form of slow motion. And all this for one cent!!

Twelfth Street was getting a little run down by that time and a lot of "Panhandlers" would hang around that area and try to get money from the people in the area. It was usually spent on cheap wine.

I remember one funny incident that happened there one day. I was just leaving the area to catch a bus home. I had spent all my money, except for my bus fare. I saw a "Panhandler" coming toward me and decided on the spur of the moment to turn the beg around. As he got close enough to hear me, I hit him with one of the saddest stories you could image. He looked sad and gave me 50 cents. He then asked me to work the other side of the street, because I was working his side. I was really proud of myself, but I never did that again. That beggar never hit me up again either.

Twelfth Street in Fort Worth would be one of my favorite places for many years. The Fort Worth Public Library was also near there and that also became a favorite hangout for many years. I got a library card and checked out books on many subjects, but mostly photography. I think I read every book they had on the subject for a lot of years.

There was another thing I loved about the Library and that was the phonograph records. A person could listen to the records in a room on the second floor. You would see the librarian and check out what you wanted to hear. She would unlock the door to the listening room and you could spend hours in there listening to music.

My favorite music was jazz, but they didn't have any in the library. The closest thing I could get was Gershwin and that was close enough. "Rhapsody In Blue" was a favorite with me.

I had another tragedy in my life at that house on Ralph. There was a small house on the back of the property that had been a rent house. My older cousin, Billy Moffitt and his wife, Vermell had lived there for awhile. No one was renting the place, so my parents let me move into it. I had my photo darkroom in the building next door and I had my own place. As a young teenager, I was on top of the world. One day, I left the front door open as I went to my parent’s house. There was a gas stove in the room and I had some papers on the table nearby. The wind picked up and blew the papers into the fire and within minutes, I had lost most of my belongings along with my home. The fire department saved only my darkroom, which was great. But I lost everything else. When I went to school, some friends brought me clothes and my parents also bought me some new clothes.

While living there, my brother was born. I loved history and I was studying Texas history at the time my brother was born. I asked my mother if I could name him. She asked what I wanted to name him and I said, “Sam Houston.” Sam Houston was a Texas hero and called, the father of Texas. Mother didn’t like that, so I said, “What about Stephen Austin?” He was also a Texas hero. Mother said, OK so that’s how my brother was named. My uncle, Austin Moffett thought he was named for him, but no one ever told him where Steve got his name.

Sometime around this time, I got my first dog. My family in Sherman had a dog named Shorty and he had a son, Junior. Junior got into some kind of trouble and my family had to get rid of him or he was going to be killed. I took Junior and he became father to Spike and Mike, two tailless rat terriers. Paula claimed Mike and I claimed Spike. I don’t know what happened to their mother, but the pups were born under our house on Melrose Street and I kept Spike until I married and moved away. He disappeared after that. I don’t know what happened to Paula’s dog, Mike.

CHAPTER 7

MY HITCHHIKING EXPERIENCES

As a young teen, I started something that few would do these days. I started hitchhiking. My parents would give me money to ride the train or interurban to visit my grandmother in Sherman Texas. I thought I would save money and hitchhike. I got maps and figured out where I wanted to go and took my suitcase in hand and started down the road. I did it for many years and had mostly good experiences.

I only remember a few bad experiences. Once I decided to go to Sherman by way of Dallas. I only took that route that one time. I was picked up by a pervert. When I refused his advances, he took me way off the main road and left me there in a field. I was pretty scared, and was glad to get to my destination unharmed. That never happened again.

I once decided I wanted to get some work with my Uncle, Johnny Robbins. He usually had work for me in the summer. He grew cotton and raised cattle. I started hitchhiking north of Fort Worth towards my destination of his farm near Petrolia, Texas on the Oklahoma border. I was picked up just outside Fort Worth by a man that was going to Alaska. He asked me to go with him and I almost agreed, but I thought that my folks would be too angry with me for going that far, so I declined. He may have been a pervert also, but he didn't seem so.

That man let me out in Henrietta Texas and I started hitchhiking north to the border. For some reason, it seemed as though no one was on the road that day. It was hot and I walked for miles carrying my suitcase. I finally got a ride to Petrolia, but that was as far as anyone was going that day. I walked the rest of the way and it was getting dark.

I think it was about 10 miles to my uncle’s farm. It was a very unusual walk. The sky was clouded over and there was no moon at all. It was so dark I couldn't see anything. I really had to walk slowly because I couldn't see the road. I just scooted my feet along in order to stay on the road. I was getting a little scared. I had always been afraid of snakes and spiders and I could imagine they were everywhere.

You may remember me telling about my musical tastes. One of my favorite songs was "Glowworm." I never knew what a glowworm was, but that night out on that dark road, I learned what a glow worm is. There were many small worms crawling on that road that night. I would guess they were about one or two inches long. When they crawled off the road, and into the weeds, I could no longer see them. So I decided that where they were must be the road, so that's how I stayed on the road after I discovered that.

Since I now had the glowworms to guide me I could pick up speed. Finally around midnight I saw a faint red glow in the distance. It was my uncle’s house. That was a very interesting experience and I now know what a glow worm is.

Another hitching experience was one that had some tense moments also. I was hitchhiking to Sherman, and I decided to do something different. I passed Sherman and headed over into Oklahoma. I then went to Sulphur Oklahoma and the National Park there.

After playing around the park and drinking some of the terrible tasting mineral waters, I decided I had better head for some where I knew someone. I was not able to get a ride and it was getting dark. Suddenly, someone began throwing rocks at me from a high hill on the side of the road. I thought I was in real trouble, when a truck stopped and a man with a uniform said, "Get in Boy!" I did. The man was a park ranger and he had seen me being pelted with rocks and was going to protect me. He told me that there were a lot of bad Indians around there and I had better spend the night at his house.

Of course, I agreed and he put me up for the night at his house. The next morning his wife had fixed us a good breakfast and had it on the table when I got up. My tastes are a little different from most people. I have always hated eggs with runny yellows. That morning the lady had fried me three "over easy" eggs as well as bacon and biscuits.

Because they were so nice to me, I ate everything and they never knew I was about to "throw up" because of those eggs. They probably thought I was very hungry because I nearly swallowed those eggs whole. I just wanted to get rid of them without hurting the feelings of these nice people.

The next day I caught a ride to Waurika Oklahoma. I then had to walk a long way. I remember I was very thirsty and all I had was 13 cents. I saw a small country grocery store, so I went inside and found the place where soft drinks were kept. I took out a large Coke and drank it. When I went to pay, there was still no one there, so I left my 13 cents and went on my way. I only had to go about 30 miles and I would be at my Grandmother Robbins house in Byres Texas.

I learned that I could have some pretty good adventures without money.

One more hitchhiking story and it's out of sequence, but I just remembered it. It was in about 1956. For some reason, I was without a car and I had just had an argument with my girlfriend, Georgia Record, (I later married her and changed her name to Sammye Lamb). I decided to go to Sherman and run around with my uncle, Joe Lamb. A friend, Ken Curliss, wanted to go with me, so we both hitchhiked to Sherman. When we were ready to go back to Fort Worth, Joe wanted to go with us. For some reason, we were all without a car, so we started walking and hitchhiking west out of Sherman and heading for Fort Worth. We walked all the way to Whitesboro, about 19 miles. South of Whitesboro, we got a ride for only about two miles.

We spent the rest of the night sitting around a campfire we built on the side of the road to keep from freezing. Not one car stopped all night. At daylight, I walked to the other side of the road and stuck up my thumb to the first car going back north. The first car stopped and we all got in and went back to Sherman. We got back in time for breakfast and Grandma never even knew we had spent the night on the road. It's very hard for three teenage boys to get a ride in the same car. Joe stayed home and Ken and I went back to Fort Worth.

Back to the chronological telling of this story

CHAPTER 8

Learning to Drive

My first training in driving came from Red Terry. There was a "junk yard" in our neighborhood. Red and I would go there after dark and play around in the old junk cars. We played like we were driving. And we learned to shift gears by imitating the sound an engine makes as someone shifts gears in a real life situation. We made the engine sounds with our throat. This really helped us when we got to "really" drive.

My Dad decided he should teach me to drive, so we got into his white Murcury, "48", I think. He wanted to know how much I knew about it. I showed him what I had practiced in the junk yard late at night. He thought that was pretty good, so he let me back out of the driveway and go driving. I almost backed over the gas meter in the front yard, but I missed it and we went for a drive in the country west of town. That was my first drive.

I learned the hard way about siphoning gas. I needed some gas for something, so I decided I could do what I had seen my Dad do. I put a hose in the tank and sucked it up. I learned that I didn't have enough training to do that correctly. I wound up with a mouth full of gas and a very weird feeling. I never did that again. I thought I'd die.

I think my first experience with real driving came with my uncle, Joe Lamb in Sherman Texas. Joe wanted to drive also, but no one would teach him. He got a job at a "Dairy Queen", or something similar. Joe then bought an old “32” Chevy, and taught himself how to drive. When I would go to Sherman, Joe and I would go out and practice our driving.

We must have been a real danger to Sherman and vicinity. Sometimes when Joe was at work I would take the car and go for a drive alone. I really loved it. Of course, that old car had its problems. One was a leaky radiator. I remember it overheating on me when I was out riding around. I found a lake and an old drink can on the side of the road. I made many trips to the lake to get water in that old can and back to the steaming car. I finally got it cool enough to open the cap and start refilling it with muddy lake water.

I remember a couple of dangerous incidents in that old car. Once, Joe and some of his friends and I went for a ride. They all wanted to drive, so we all took turns driving on back country roads. The most dangerous part of that trip was the way we took turns. We never stopped the car to change drivers. We would just crawl out the widow and over the hood and slip in to the driver’s seat while someone kept their foot on the gas pedal to keep from stopping. We did this many times without an accident. STUPID!!!

Another dangerous time I remember in that old Chevy was when Joe and I went for a drive one Sunday morning. We were on the top of a hill north of Sherman when we ran out of gas. Joe said he knew about a gas station at the bottom of the hill. All we had to do was push the car down the hill and into the gas station.

Joe and I started pushing and the car started rolling. Not too fast at first, it was not a steep hill. Just before we got to the station, the grade got steeper and the car got ahead of us. We ran to try to catch it, but it got to the station before we did. Unfortunately, it was going too fast and it hit the gas pump.

The old gas pumps were much different than today's pumps. There was a large vertical handle on one side and if you pumped it back and forth, you would get gas pumped up into a large glass container on top. Then you put the hose in the gas tank and released the gas you wanted into the tank.

The tank of the pump we hit was already full of gas and the car flattened the pump and let the gas spill out on the ground. There was no one at the station, so Joe and I pushed the car off the tank and back onto the road and down the rest of the hill. I think we went all the way back into Sherman on that last push.

I bet the station owner was really mad to find his pump on the ground, as well as his gas.

Later, my father decided to teach me correct driving and he did. I didn't tell him about my previous driving experience. But there was one thing I neglected to do for many years. I drove for about six years without a license. I was afraid I couldn't pass the test. I did pass it though with "flying colors". I really had nothing to worry about all those years.

My teen years were full of driving experiences I may write about later.

While talking about Joe Lamb, I remembered a couple of stories about him that I will tell now. One Sunday morning we were going hunting, but it was raining and we decided we didn’t want to get wet, so we stayed in his room and shot at a painting of birds that was hanging on his wall.

Joe loved to do silly things. One night we both went to bed without turning out the light. We argued over who was going to get up to turn out the light. Finally, Joe said, “I’ll do it.” He then picked up a gun and shot it out. That old house on Maple was full of bullet holes

Once when I went to Sherman, Joe was not home, so I went looking for him. I found him drunk in his car. I decided that I would drive his car and take him home. I would get him to take me to get my car the next day after he sobered up. While driving him home, I was getting a little warm, so I said, “Joe, I’m getting hot, will you crack your window?” He said, “OK”, and then he picked up a large wrench and broke out his window. I didn’t think he would take me literally, but he did.

One more Joe Lamb story while I am thinking about it. Once Joe wanted to install an intercom from his room to Grandma’s room. His plan was to run the wires under the floor. He had to drill two holes in each floor to run the wires. Joe decided he could drill the holes easier with his pistol, so he took aim and fired two holes in the floor of each room. He used a small caliber pistol to make small holes for the wires. I think in those days it was not unusual for boys to have guns. I often took mine to school with me and left it in the car. Times have changed a lot over the years. Today, if a kid brings a gun to school, it’s a major offence and he will probably wind up in jail.

Chapter 9

Work Experience

I spoke earlier about my first job of cutting grass, and then there was the job working in Terry's Washateria. Then there were the summer jobs working for my uncle in his hardware store.

Another job was working for my Grandfather, “Pop“. He once grew cotton on a farm west of Burleson Texas. I would get paid to chop cotton. Chopping is what it was called to thin out the cotton, so it would grow stronger and not be choked out by too many plants.

When the cotton was ready to be picked, Pop would hire a lot of people to pick it. There were two ways to pick cotton. One was called picking the bolls and you would pick the whole cotton boll including the hard sharp outer husk. The other way was the best and that was by picking the cotton out of the husks and putting it in long cotton sacks that you drug behind you. The latter way was the best for two reasons. One, it didn’t hurt your hands so much because the bolls were very hard and sharp. Two, this way paid more because the cotton was weighed without the bolls and that way, Pop sold it for more money. We were paid 10 cents per pound for the cotton without the bolls and eight cents per pound with the bolls.

I think the best I ever did was about 100 pounds and that was worth $10. That was a lot of money for a kid in those days. There were a lot of memories in those days working for Pop. I still remember some of the bits of wisdom I learned from him.

Grandmother and Pop did a lot of things on that farm. Pop not only grew cotton, but also peanuts. And he had some milk cows and Grandmother made butter and sold it to people in the area, along with eggs and buttermilk.

I also chopped cotton and worked on a farm for Uncle Johnnie, as well as Uncle Austin and Cousin Billy Moffett.

I got another job later delivering newspapers. Red Terry, Wayne Jefferies and I as well as a few others got jobs delivering the "fort Worth Press." Our routes were at Carswell Air Force Base.

My route was mostly on the Base in the Band Barracks, but it also went off base and on again into the Officers housing area. I felt very independent working for myself and making collections, keeping books, etc. I not only delivered on a route, but I set up places where I left a money box and sold papers individually. This of course was on speculation, but it worked for me because I usually sold enough to make enough profit to more than cover my losses on papers that didn't sell.

Our route manager was T.J.Bramlett. He would pick us boys up after school and take us to the base and drop us off. At night he would pick us up and take us home.

I had a lot of experiences on that job. I can remember some of my customers would give me things. Especially when they were being shipped out and they couldn't take everything home with them I was given a number of model airplanes, cars, etc. I really loved that job.

Once, while we were in school, a large bomber missed the runway and crashed into Lake Worth. It was the first B-36 crash in history. That was September 16. 1949. It was the first crash of a B-36. As a paperboy, I was able to walk onto the crash site with no problem. I really felt like a big shot and even found a piece of the plane I kept for a souvenir. Of course that was illegal, but I didn't know it until later. I also sold all my papers that day and got a lot of tips too.

Another memorable experience about that time was an encounter with a large dangerous Chow dog. He was on my route and belonged to one of my customers. The dog was usually on a long chain and he would try to get me every day, but I knew the length of the chain. One day as I came around the corner of the house and he was there waiting for me, but this time, he was loose. I still don't know what made me think of it, but, I had a paper rolled up and ready for delivering to his master. I delivered it to the dog instead. Right down his throat.

I just continued on my route as if nothing happened. I glanced over my shoulder to see him coughing and gagging with my paper in his mouth. The next day, he was on his chain, but he never did try to scare me again. I think he was afraid of me for a change.

A sad thing happened to one of my customers. He was a pilot that was written up in Ripley‘s "Believe It Or Not". The thing that made him famous was the fact that he was the only pilot in the Air Force that was authorized to wear cowboy boots in uniform. It was claimed that he couldn't wear traditional Air Force shoes, so he had special permission to wear the boots.

The sad part of the story came one night when he was shot to death. It was said to be an accident. He was shot by his own wife. The story was that he was supposed to fly cross country one night, so he left telling his wife he would see her the next day. The flight was canceled that night so he went home. His wife thought he was a burglar, and shot him through the door. He died instantly.

Another experience was when I decided to be a hero. We had finished our routes and we were waiting for Bramlett to pick us up. It was wintertime and getting dark early. We were waiting beside the bathhouse at the base beach on the side of a small lake. It was too cold for anyone to go swimming, so I knew something was wrong when I saw a woman walk into the dark murky waters of the lake. I ran to her and pulled her out. She tried to fight me off, so I called for the other guys to help me. We got her back on shore and asked her what she was doing. She told us her husband had done something wrong and she wanted to die. I told someone to go get the MP's and they did. I stayed with her until they came and took her away.



This was the Base Swimming Pool where we saved the woman from drowning herself.

That job was an exciting one for me. One thing I remember was that we never got hungry on that job. Red's area included a mess hall and a fire station. There was always something good to eat at the fire station. We all loved that job. I began to get a taste for travel here too.

Once, the "Press" had a contest to see who could get the most new customer subscriptions. I won and for a prize, I was sent by train to Houston. The winners were given some tours. We went to the San Jacinto Monument and up to the top. We were given a tour of the Battleship Texas and a few other things. We stayed at the Shamrock Hotel in Houston. It was the largest and finest hotel in Texas at the time.

It was a very big thing for me to get to travel all alone on this, my first “big” trip alone. We also went to Galveston and got to see the Gulf Of Mexico. This was my second trip there, but my first alone.

In 1948, Television came to Fort Worth. I wanted a TV and asked Daddy to get us one. He said if I wanted a TV, I should buy it myself, so he asked a friend, Dr. Jim Bettes if there was anything I might do to make some money. Dr. Bettes had an office on White Settlement Road near Cherry Lane. The office was shared with an MD and another dentist. The doctors said they would pay me $7.00 per week to clean their offices daily. I agreed and Daddy bought the TV on credit and I made the payments. We had one of the first televisions in the neighborhood.

When I think back about that job, it’s amazing I didn’t get AIDS, because, I often stuck myself with old needles when I wrung out the mop I used on the floors.

Another job I had was a summer job working for a dental lab. My duties were mostly as a runner and delivery boy. I would deliver the false teeth to various dentists around Fort Worth. My mode of transportation was the public bus. I also did some cleaning and errand running. I also learned a little about making false teeth. It seemed like a lot of fun making myself a false plate with odd and old used teeth. I took an impression of my mouth and using the tools my dad used, I made some of the ugliest teeth anyone had ever seen.

About 40 years later, someone thought it would be a good idea to make some teeth like that and sell them in novelties stores. Today those teeth are called “BubbaTeeth. “ My teeth were perfectly fitted to me because I made a mold of my real teeth and mouth. Those teeth were given to my son and he played with them for a long time, and then gave them to his son, my grandson.

Chapter 10

By the time I got to the 8th. Grade, my asthma was much better. I discovered that the football players got to get very close to the girls. This was my plan to get some attention from the girls, so I went out for the football team. I was given jersey number 33 and the position of left tackle. It sometimes amazes me how I have been able to bluff my way through so many things in life. I have never cared about sports and don’t know anything about them.

I was able to stay on the team all through the season. I went to all the games, but only played in practice games at home. I don’t know why the coach let me on the team at all. I guess he thought he could use me when all the other players were hurt. Anyway, I only got hurt in practice.

Once, I was put opposite the largest player on the team, William Roach. The coach always told us to keep our heads down and I did, except that time. I looked up just as Big Bill was charging across the line like an enraged bull. I hit his helmet with my nose. I saw stars. It was broken and I had a football injury that the girls could hug for. It was GREAT!!!

I also love the end of the game when all the uniformed players would run off the field. It didn’t matter if we had won or lost, the girls were all there to hug the players. That’s why I went out for football. It was also the only time I ever played football. I never tried out for the team again.

The summer of that year, my family moved out of White Settlement. We moved back to Poly, an area on the east side of Fort Worth. You might remember that’s where we lived when I started school. This time we moved into a two-story house at 3816 Avenue N.



This is an old photograph of me with my brother, Steve and my dog, Spike. This was shot in the back yard of our house on Avenue N. Note the cigar.

Chapter 11

I liked living in Poly. It was a somewhat upscale neighborhood at that time. Poly was much classier than White Settlement.

Our house looked very nice. It had a lot of trees and a nice yard. My mother wanted it to be pink, so my dad painted it pink and put pink flamingos in the front yard. The man we bought it from had a large aviary of doves and he sold them to me. My mother also decided she wanted to breed parakeets, so Dad bought her a few pairs of breeders and built her a large “walk-in” aviary. So, Mother and I were then in the bird business.

Before too long, I decided that bird breeding was too much work and it cut into my other pursuits. I sold my doves, but Mother continued with her bird business. Without the doves, I had room for a small workshop. My dad used the garage for his workshop.

My sister and I had the upstairs bedrooms and mine was the largest. I had room in my bedroom for my darkroom, so I was able to continue my photo pursuits.

I started 9th. Grade at William James Junior High School. This was my first and only shop class. I took metal shop and learned a little about cutting metal, soldering, and making small projects. My first project was a wall lamp with a planter in front. I made it out of sheet tin.

I met a few boys at William James that were not of the highest moral character. Some later went to prison and one was executed for murder. I also met some girls that were not of the highest morals. One girl I really liked was Carolyn Dodd. She was not one of the immoral ones mentioned earlier. Carolyn was more like a good friend than a girlfriend. It was very nice to have a pretty girl for a friend. We liked and trusted each other, but it was not a romantic friendship. We went to Junior High School dances together and to the best of my memory, we danced pretty well. That was my first experience at “slow dancing.” The dances were held on the second floor of a building on Rosedale Street across the street from Texas Wesleyan University

Junior High was not very memorable so this may be a short section. One thing I do remember though was an incident that caused me pain. There was a bully that always wanted to fight but I didn’t. One day after school, he started in on me again and I didn’t want to look bad in front of my friends, so I decided I might beat him in a wrestling match. I got him in a headlock that caused him some pain and embarrassment. When my bus came, I turned him loose and he hit me pretty hard in the eye. That was all I remembered for a long time. I thought he had knocked me out, but some friends later told what really happened.

It’s been known for years that some members of my family lose all control under a given circumstance and we do things we have no control over. Evidently, this happened to me when he hit me. My friends spread the word all over the community that I was a very good fighter and no one should ever challenge me. They said that when he hit me, I came at him like a tornado and beat him to a pulp. I guess that was right because I heard it from many different people. Also to put more credence to the story, he never bothered me again and even avoided me all together.

My Uncle Bill at the feed store even heard about it and it seemed to give him a lot of happiness. He talked about that fight with a lot of pride. I had been sickly for most of my life although I tried football one year.

At William James Junior High School I didn’t try any kind of sports. When PE came around, I was the “towel boy.” I did enjoy Shop and Science. My Science teacher liked me and thought I might be a doctor. She liked me so much; she gave me all her fathers’ medical journals.

When my Science teacher’s father, a MD died she inherited all his old medical books and that’s what she gave me. I also thought I might be a doctor, but I just had too many interests. I did use my medical interests to treat my gang friends when they got shot or stabbed. It’s funny when you look back and think that I was a friend with the worst and the best people. I was accepted by most even though I never did anything illegal.

I loved to go to downtown Fort Worth on the city bus. Often my friends and I would roam the streets of Fort Worth for many hours. Sometimes we would catch the last bus to Poly, The area where I lived then.

I’ll never forget one of those nights when we caught the last bus home. I was with one of those “bad” boys who were often in trouble. I don’t remember his name. The route from downtown Fort Worth to Poly was about five miles. The longest part of the trip was going east on Vickery Boulevard. Just east of the intersection of Riverside Drive and Vickery was a long hill and Vickery curved at the top of the hill. As the bus topped the hill we were hit head on by a car speeding up the hill from the east.

It was a very loud and destructive crash. The bus driver was the only one on the bus that was hurt. His head was cut and he was bleeding pretty badly. All the passengers and the driver got off the bus through the back door. My friend and I followed the crowd to the car that hit us.

It was easy to see that the passengers were either dead or dying at that time. Some of the men, my friend, and I literally ripped the door off to try to help the men inside. Someone noticed a liquid flowing from under the car and down the hill and under the bus. Another person said that if that was gas it was running under the bus (which was still running and sparking at that time) might catch fire and explode killing us all.

I decided that if I could shut off the engine that might cut down on the danger. The driver was still conscience and told me how to shut off the engine. My friend and I then got on the bus and killed the engine, then went to see if we could help the injured men in the car.

A few minutes later someone screamed, “The bus is moving.” What had happened was the engine running had kept pressure in the damaged brake lines and when I shut off the engine the air leaked out and the brakes failed. Once again my friend and I ran to get on the bus and try to do something. I got on first and ran to the front of the slowly moving bus in an attempt to stop it. It was no use, there was no air left in the lines and the bus began picking up speed rolling backwards down Vickery Street. My friend saw I couldn’t stop it, so he bailed out. At that point I saw the ambulance coming at high speed and the bus rolling straight towards the ambulance. I made a quick decision to try to steer the bus away from the ambulance.

I pulled on the steering wheel with all my strength and I was able to slow the bus by scraping it against a utility pole and then stop it by hitting a factory building. When I saw I had it and it was going to hit, I grabbed the top of two seats and held on. When it hit, it hit so hard; I pulled the two seats I was holding out of where they were bolted to the floor of the bus.

I didn’t realize I was hurt at the time, so I just squeezed out of the back door that was now resting safely against the building. There were more ambulances there by that time and they loaded the driver and the men into them and started off to the hospital. Someone asked if I wanted to go to the hospital with them and said, “No, I’m allright.” Soon another bus came to take us all home.

When I got home, I was beginning to feel pain in my knee and shoulders. I guess I had pulled something when I hit the building. It was after midnight and my parents were asleep. I woke my mother up to tell her what had happened and she thought I had been drinking and she didn’t believe me. She told me to go to bed. I did.

The next morning, my mother came up to my room to check on me and see if I was all right. She had heard the news in the morning and knew that what I had told her was true. She then took me to a doctor for a check up. I was just bruised and sore. Later when the Fort Worth Star Telegram came out, I was disappointed to read the story and find out I was written about as a hero, but no one knew who I was. The paper said, “A second accident was averted when an unidentified teenager jumped onboard and steered the damaged bus away from the ambulance and into a building.”

Another thing I remember about that time of my life was the time I decided I could dig a swimming pool in our yard. I thought I could do it, but after about a week of digging, I decided it was too much work so I filled the hole with water and sat in like it was a mud bath. It was later filled in.

While at William James Junior High I met and fell in love with a pretty red haired girl named Candy. Anyway, she went to school at the same school I went to, but she lived in another neighborhood. She lived in Meadowbrook and I think it was Meadowbrook Drive.

My not-so-nice friend that was with me on the bus also had a girl friend at the same time and we all made plans to get married. I guess the hormones were raging at that time. I don’t remember what happened to that relationship, but it died anyway. I think her mother killed it for us. Anyway, I survived. I probably hitchhiked to Sherman and forgot all about her that summer. I think that was the summer my uncle let me drive his car and my father bought me my first “running” car.

While living there I got my first five cars and a Whizzer motor bike and a motor scooter. I’ll first talk about my two-wheeled transportation. The first, I got from my Uncle Joe Lamb in Sherman. It was a Whizzer motor bike. This was a bicycle with a motor. You would start riding it as a bike, then put the motor in gear and relax and let the motor do the rest. I didn’t ride it very long and I had an accident on it that slowed me down. A car turned in front of me and I had to hit the brakes and wound up sliding on my right knee. This was the third or fourth time I hurt my right knee and I have had trouble with it for most of my life.

The motor scooter was not ridden much, it was more of a novelty. It was a small two wheeled scooter with the seat over the motor. I think the last time I rode it was when I turned the corner at a high speed, which caused me to stand up thinking I was going to have to jump off. Well, I didn’t have to jump off and I recovered. The problem now was that when I stood up to jump, the seat fell off and when I recovered, I went to sit down again, but this time, I sat down on the motor and the spark plug started shocking me in my butt. I started yelling as I was constantly being shocked until I jumped off. That was the last thing I remember about that scooter.

It was about this time that I went to work for Bill’s Super Market. I was hired as a sack boy. My job was to sack groceries and then offer to carry them to the car. A few people gave me a tip, but that was uncommon. I usually just put the groceries in the car and said, “Thank you and come back.” That as the reason for a funny story. I was hitchhiking to Sherman and when I got out of a car, instead of saying, “Thanks for the ride.” I got out of the car and said, “Thanks and come back.”

One Sunday, as I as riding my bike to work, I suddenly decided to just keep riding and see how far I could go. I rode all the way to Dallas, about 30 miles and then back home, which was of course a round trip of 60 miles. I think I got fired from Bill’s after that day of not showing up for work.

It was also around this time that I was shot at. As far as I can remember, it was the only time someone shot at me. I as riding my bike out in the country on Randal Mill Road, when I decided I needed to make a “nature call”. I put my bike down in the ditch and crawled under the fence to find a private spot. Suddenly, I heard a gunshot and the dirt around my feet started flying. I jumped down into a gully and every time I tried to get up, another shot rang out and hit right beside me. I stayed out of sight until it got dark, then I slithered out of that gully and over to the fence and under it to where my bike was. There were no more shots, so I rode home late that night.

My first car was a 1939 Chevy that my uncles in Sherman gave me. It did not run, so my dad and uncle helped me tow it home. They drove my dad’s car and I steered the old Chevy. I never could get it running, so I took the engine out and we tried to sell it to a junk yard. No one wanted it, so we loaded the stripped down car on my uncle’s flatbed truck and on a Sunday morning took it to a junk yard that was closed and backed up to the fence around the junkyard and we pushed it off and over the fence and then we drove off leaving it there inside the junkyard.

My next car was a 1940 Ford sedan. I remember driving it a little, but I do not remember what we did with it. One story I remember about that old Ford was once I ran out of gas and asked my uncle, Marvin Snellings to help me get some gas for it. He took me to get gas and then took me home to put the gas in the car. It was getting dark and I was having trouble seeing to get the gas in the tank. Marvin then lit a match so I could see. As soon as I saw what he was going to do, I yelled, “Don’t strike that match!”, but I was too slow telling him. As soon as he lit it, my gas tank caught fire. I dropped the gas can and put the cap on my gas tank. Unfortunately, I dropped the gas can on its side and it rolled down the hill, setting the street on fire. The street was lit up for about a city block. Someone called the fire department, but by the time they got there the fire was all out except in the gas can. They said, “Where’s the fire?” and I said “there on the ground.” They said something nasty and shot one quick spurt with a fire extinguisher and left. I think my uncle learned his lesson.

Then, I got my first good car. Daddy said he could spend up to $125 for a good car. That was possible in those days.

Dad took me to a used car lot on Henderson Street in Fort Worth and bought me a 1942 Chevy.

I was very proud of that car. It was very clean and had a sunvisor and a heater. Heaters were not standard equipment in those days, but someone had installed a gasoline-operated heater in the car.

I did not drive the car to school for a long time. I rode the bus. I think it was because I did not have insurance or a driver’s license.

As far as I can remember, I never had insurance, but I did get a drivers license and started to drive to school. I drove that Chevy to Tech for a couple of years.

It was sometime around this time that my uncle Clyde Lamb told me that the Lambs were descended from royalty. He said that all royalty had a distinctly different knot on the back of our ears. Clyde had told so many stories that I just did not believe there was anything to the royalty story. Sometime in the 1980’s, my wife was doing research on our family and sure enough, she traced my family back to the kings and queens of Great Britain.

Chapter 12

My High School Experiences

In September of 1953, I enrolled in Technical High School. At that time, Technical High was on the north side of Fort Worth. It later moved to the central part of town, where it is at this writing.

I was so thrilled to get to go to Tech. If you will remember, my photo instructor told me that he had taught me all he could and I had to wait until I got to high school before I could get any more training. Many years had passed since I got the “photo bug” and finally I was starting my official photo training.

At Tech, a student would spend half the school day in his chosen field and the rest of the day in academics. My photo teacher was Mr. Orton Hamby, a short, chubby, friendly man. In addition, as far as I was concerned, the smartest man in the world. Mr. Hamby was simply a great teacher. I do not think I ever heard a bad word spoken about him. I had many friends in photography, but few continued in the field after graduation.



This is me in Photo Class about 1954

Wayne Frizzell, Robert Ray Roddy and I were always trying to be the best photographers.

Wayne and I stayed in photography after school, but Roddy always wanted to be in show business and we all went our separate ways after school. I stayed in Photography; Wayne joined the Air Force and was shot down in Viet Nam. He has remained MIA. Roddy went into radio in Fort Worth. I lost track of him for awhile, then found him on the radio in New Orleans. He later made it to TV where he became the announcer on “Price Is Right”, where he stayed until his death. We kept in touch by E-MAIL and phone. We both kept in touch with Mr. Hamby, who was in a nursing home in Virginia until his death.

While in High School, a young photo enthusiast named Stephens would come to the photo class to try to learn photography. He was not old enough to be in high school, but we took care of him anyway. He had a “Brownie Hawkeye” camera, so we called him “Hawkeye Stevens.” In 1999, I got a call from a newspaper editor in Texas and he told me he was “Hawkeye”. So someone else stayed connected to photography.

Another old friend from photo school stayed in photography. A beautiful girl, Linda Kaye Reed, was in some of my photo classes and I liked her a lot, but I never thought she would be a photographer. After school, I lost track of her, then in 1974, I had just joined the Texas Professional Photographers Association and was at a convention in San Antonio Texas, when I saw Linda again. She had indeed stayed in photography. She even became a Master of photography and won many awards in the USA.

Enough of that, let’s get back the chronological telling of this story. Photography was the main reason I went to school. I had little interest in anything thing else. When I started in photography, Mr. Nevils, of Nevil’s Studio in White Settlement taught me as much as he could and then said I needed more formal training. As soon as I was old enough for High School, I enrolled in photo at Tech High.

I probably learned more about photography in three years at tech than the rest of my life in photography. The first two years was all black and white photography, and then in my senior year, I studied color and some motion picture photography. I never did much in motion pictures, but once the Greek Air Force asked me to help them with a movie. In color, I learned about Flexachrome and that was very interesting. I also learned to print in color and to oil color photographs.

While in High School, I got a job at Reporter Publishing Company. I was the head photographer there and I was sent out on many assignments as well as some news jobs I came across on my own. Reporter Publishing Company published seven neighborhood newspapers and one news magazine, “The Fort Worther”. I did most of the shooting and all of the darkroom work. I covered accidents, fires, and many other news events. The darkroom work was slow in those days and I would put the film in the developer, lock the darkroom up, and go eat at George’s Coney Island or somewhere similar. I loved chilidogs and ate a lot of them.

One night I saw a large glow in the sky and I tracked it down to see the largest fire I had ever seen. It was Buddies Super Market on 28th Street in Haltom City Texas. I have always loved free food and that night I made friends with the fire department and their refreshment truck. They fed the firefighters and me very well. After the fire was under control, I went inside and found a couple of boxes of my favorite cigars and a lot of candy. They were only slightly smoke damaged, so I filled my pockets. There were two walls left standing and I wanted to shoot them as they fell. I was warned to stay away, because they could fall on me. I waited at a “safe” distance until early morning. Then I figured I could not wait any longer and I went to town and made the prints for the next edition. The walls fell in as soon as I left. I was not a good writer, so I gave all the information to a reporter and he wrote the story. This was the pattern for all the news stories I did on my own. I would shoot them and someone else would write them. It was many years later when I went to journalism school that I started writeing.

The one assignment I didn’t like was sports. I have never liked sports or sports photography. I learned what would make a good shot by watching what was going on. I saw the major action in a basketball game was around the basket, so I would focus on the basket and get the shots there. By watching baseball, I saw that there was a lot of action at the plate and the players would often slide into the plate. I focused on the plate and did most of my shooting there. Once, I was thrown out of a ball game when I picked up the ball that had fallen at my feet and I threw it back to someone. I learned that was a “NO NO”!

Once I was sent to TCU to do a picture story about Jim Swink, who was a big football hero. I didn’t know him from Adam, so I had to ask who he was and where can I find him. I went to his dormitory and asked around. I found him in the rest room. He asked me to wait until we could get back to his room before I started shooting because he was on the toilet at the time. I waited and he was happy with the job I did.

I believe that article was run in “The Fort Worther Magazine.” Of course, the company had a lot of advertising and I did most of the photography for the ads. I photographed many products, from cars to food. Food has always been one my favorite subjects. I have done many commercial jobs that were for food ads.

When I was about 13 or so, I used to go to the junk yard at night and practice my driving in old junk cars. It helped me to learn to drive. Now I am in my upper teens and I wanted to fly. I used to go to a local airfield in the Poly area and hang out with the pilots and mechanics there hoping to get some flying training. I never could get anyone to help me. I would go there late at night and climb up on the old airplanes and play like I was flying. I doubt I learned anything and anyway I was now showing interest in girls, so I didn’t have time for everything.

Another thing I was good at was shooting. I bought a 22 caliber pistol from a pawn shop and got pretty good at shooting it. I also have owned a number of 22 caliber rifles. I would shoot squirrels and rabbits with my rifle and take them home for Mother to cook for a meal.



I used to go out in the country and practice my “quick draw”.

It seems amazing in these modern times with all the school violence that I used to have pistol with me almost all the time. I usually kept it in my car when I was at school. In the 21st. Century, I would have been arrested.

Chapter 13

My High School Friends and Loves

I had many friends and a couple of loves. The last love has lasted, that was Georgie Ann Record. She became my lifelong love and friend and is now known as “Sammye Lamb.”

Some people talk about "Love at first sight", but I talk about "Love at first bite". I have always loves good food and barbecue is one of my most favorite foods. On May 11. 1956, I was waiting in line for barbecue at the school picnic, when the most beautiful girl in High school asked me for cut in line. I couldn't believe my good fortune, great barbecue and beautiful girl, so I call that "Love at first bite". Of course, that gorgeous girl was Georgie Ann Record, and almost a year later became my lifelong companion and wife. So, I got two great bites the same day, Georgie and Jetton’s barbequed brisket. We had our first kiss that night, so you might say that I got two great tastes that day.



Burgers Lake where we had our first date on May 11 1956. This was May 2007



Georgie Ann Record 1955

As mentioned earlier, I went to Technical High in Fort Worth. In those days, Tech was on the North Side of Ft. Worth. In my senior year it was moved the near south side. However, let’s try this in chronological order. One of my first friends was Lesley Shelton. Les was a year ahead of me, so he graduated before Tech moved. Les married Jean Filingame and we stayed in touch for many years. Our son, Robert Lesley was named for Les. We had planned to name our daughter Danna Jean after Jean Shelton, but we didn’t name her that. That’s another story I will tell later. Other friends mentioned earlier were Wayne Frizzell and Robert Roddy and Linda Kay Reid. There was also Sallye Mercer, Roy Lee Peacock and Ken Curliss.

I mentioned one of my loves, my wife, but there was one more. Loretta Humphrey was a very sweet and good-looking girl that I fell in love with. I was devastated when Loretta told me she was in love with someone else. She was my last love until my senior year when I met my future wife. I never saw Loretta again, but she called me about 20 years later. She told me her marriage had not worked out. I thought to myself, “You blew it girl.”

After Loretta dumped me, I was very lonely for a long time. I had friends that were girls, but no girl friends. There was Sallye Mercer and Linda Kay Reid and maybe a few more, but I never asked them out on dates.

I tried to date a couple of girls, but that didn’t work out. In 1955, there was a big dance scheduled at Tech and I had no date or plans. I had read an article that said it was a myth that the most beautiful girls are always on dates. It said Beautiful girls are often lonely because most boys think they don’t have a chance and simply don’t ask them out on dates. Right after reading that story, I was walking across campus and I saw the most beautiful girl in school walking my way. What did I have to lose? I stopped her and asked her out to the big dance. To my amazement, she said yes. WOW, I was in shock. Here I am, a nobody dating the most beautiful girl in school. Then the day before the big dance, my balloon was rapidly deflated when she told me very apologetically that she couldn’t go with me because her boyfriend, who was in the Navy, was coming home and she wanted to be with him. BUMMER!!!

Chapter 14

High School Activities

Since Robert Roddy always wanted to be in show business, he had a show at school every morning playing records and doing “schtick”. Roddy graduated in my junior year and the last year Tech was in the old buildings on the North Side of Fort Worth. When the new year started, I signed up for Speech class and took over the early morning show Roddy had started the year before. The school furnished the room, stage and sound equipment and I furnished the records. It wasn’t long before I had a nice following. I started the year with a few of my own records, but soon realized that to keep the show fresh, I would have to buy more records. I didn’t have the money for them, so Ken Curliss and I came up with the way to make money for new records. What we decided to do was to get the kids to throw money at me on the stage and to get them started; Ken started throwing money and urged the audience to do the same. I would play a record and lip sync it or dance to it and Ken would “seed” the audience to start throwing money. It was so successful, that I not only bought new records, but I had enough money left over to buy a few beers for myself. I guess I looked older then, because I had no trouble buying cigars and beer for myself.

The best part about my show was the girls that were always there. One of my greatest fans was a pretty girl named Dorothy. She had a boyfriend, but she liked me anyway, so much so, she always threw money at me on the stage.

Dorothy kept urging her good friend Georgia Record to come and see the cute boy disk jocky in the Morning Show. Finally, one day she showed up and I immediately fell in love with this beautiful friend of Dorothy’s. Unfortunately, for me, she did not want to have anything to do with me. If the name Georgia Record sound’s familiar, that’s the same girl mentioned a few paragraphs above. Georgie didn’t like her name, so she called herself Georgia. More about her later.

Since I was in Speech, I also got into a few other things, like variety shows and plays. In the variety show, I was a comedian and in the plays, I was the director. I also was MC for other events, like political campaigns for Class President or Student Body President. I had a lot of friends at Tech and I don’t think I had any enemies.

Some of the other activities I was involved with were related to my chosen profession of photography. I worked for Reporter Publishing Company, mentioned earlier. As a member of the working press, I carried a Press card and had large sign on my car that said, “PRESS CAR” in big red letters. This allowed me to park almost anywhere and get into many functions. I never paid to get into any game, although I only went there for the girls. Since I was a professional photographer, I was pretty popular with both boys and girls. The morning show also helped my popularity. This came in handy in many ways. Once I was out late at night and when I went to my car to go home, I was met by a boy who knew me at school. When he saw me get into my car, he shouted for me to wait a minute. He then shouted something in Spanish and two or three boys I didn’t know came out of the shadows and put my hubcaps back on my car. The boy who knew me apologized and said he didn’t know it was my car. It was not the car I had with the “Press Car” sign on it.

I got my first taste of predudice in high school. When I asked a pretty girl in my photo class for a date, she told me that she would love to go out with me, but her father wouldn’t let her date “white” boys. I was confused. She was a Mexican girl and I thought Mexicans were considered white. I asked her what she meant and she explained that her father thought she should only date other Mexicans and he/they only thought of Caucasians as “white.” That was the first I’d ever heard of that. Reverse prejudice.

In High School, I joined the Vocational Industrial Club Of Texas. Each year, we went to a convention out of town and that was good fun. I don’t remember where we went my first year, but in my Junior Year, we went to Galveston and we had all our contests at the University Of Texas there. The contests were easy for me and I won first place in all the tests for photography. One test was loading 4X5 film holders and I beat everyone by a long shot. Some of the kids had never loaded a holder before. One of the holder loading tests was done in the light before the judges. We were blindfolded for that one. Another test was to see how fast we could take a negative, put it in an enlarger and make an 8X10 print. We had 4X5 Omega enlargers and I think we had Speed Easels. Again, I beat out the competition easily. Maybe all those years as a professional photographer paid off. Anyway, I was tops in Texas VIC for photography all the time I was there. The only place I didn’t win first was in the print competition. I got second and third there. I don’t remember what the winning subject was, but it was pretty good.

While in Galveston, we went swimming and to an amusement park. I was ahead of my time for High School, because as early as my Junior year, I was smoking and drinking. I have been told I looked old for my age and I never had any trouble buying liquor. And it was not illegal to buy tobacco in those days at any age. I reached my maximum height (5’ 10”) at about 17.



Does this look like a cigar smoking, whiskey drinker?

Before we went to the amusement park, I had a few drinks and I was feeling mellow, so I rode a lot of the rides. When we got to the top of the first hill on the roller coaster, I dropped my cigar in my lap and I spend the rest of the ride trying to find it. I remember it was a very big and fast wooden roller coaster that was high in the sky and close to the beach. It was very exciting.

In my senior year we went to Austin for the VIC tests and I won again. I remember taking a bottle of whiskey with me to Austin and drinking in my room. It seems like Ken Curliss was my room mate, but I’m not sure. I remember the motel we stayed at was near the center of Austin and we walked to the University for the Convention. On our first day there, we walked toward the University and since it was about 11 Am and we didn’t know when we would get a chance to eat, we decided to stop at a fancy restaurant on the river and eat. There were about six of us high school boys and we walked in and found a table. The table was set with linen napkins, water glasses, dishes and a lot of butter and crackers. There was no one in sight, so we just ate crackers and butter and drank water while waiting for the waiter. I guess no one in Austin ate that early because; we sat there about 30 minutes with no one to take our order. After we had eaten all the crackers and butter and drank all the water, we were full, so we just left. That was a cheap meal.

Another activity I did at this time actually had nothing to do with school, but it started when I was in High School. It was the beginng of my military career. My old friend Red Terry joined the Texas Army National Guard and asked me to join too. I went with him to a meeting and got the papers and parental concent form to join. My parents thought it was OK, so I joined and became “Private Bobby D. Lamb”.

We held our meetings at an old gym in Fort Worth. Not long after I joined we started meeting at an old military base and this seemed a lot more like real Army. When I first joined, I only knew my friends, Red Terry, Wayne Jeffries and Maurice Lambert. No one knew about my professional photography experience, so I was assigned to the suppy department of the 249th Battalion of the 49th Armored Division of the Texas Army National Guard. The new location of the battalion was at the Newark Texas National Guard Base near Eagle Mountain Lake.

Soon after being assigned to the Base, my Company Comander, Capt. McKnight, learned about my work as a professional photographer and he decided I was being wasted in Supply. There were no “official” assignments as photographer, since that was part of the Signal Corps and the National Guard Signal Corps was all based in New Jersey. Captain McKnight assigned me as a Jeep driver and that way, I could be free to drive all over and photograph anything I wanted and he would get to be in as many photos as I could put him in. There was an old barracks building on the base that was not being used by anyone, so he gave it to me to use as I saw fit. I didn’t take the whole building, but just a few rooms and turned one into a dark room and one into an office. I was also promoted to Private First Class and I got my first stripe.

This was a very “sweet” assignment. All I had to do was dress up as a soldier one weekend a month and go drive around and photograph anything I wanted. There was a runway on the old Base and a lot of private planes used it. I would drive my Jeep down on the runway and wait for a private plane to land. Then I would drive up to the plane and tell the pilot I needed his services to make some aerial photos. The pilot wanted to keep using the runway and wanted to keep the Army happy. He didn’t know I had no authority there, so he would take me up and I enjoyed my flights and aerial photography. Captain McKnight loved it, too because I would give him aerial photos of the Base and the surrounding countryside.

Other than what’s mentioned above, I had a few other adventures in the Guard. Once, there was a flood in Fort Worth and the Guard was mobilized to protect people and property. We were given guns, but no amunition. We were told to act as if they were loaded. Of course, I turned my rifle in for a pistol and took off with my Jeep and my photo equipment. Before we could get to town to “play” soldier, the mobilization was cancelled and we all went home.

Another interesting time was when we were assigned to be in the annual “Fat Stock Show Parade” in downtown Fort Worth. This was during the Korean conflict and there was a lot of patriotism. The problem was with the tank drivers. They had never been forced to drive in such a straight line. Before they got to the parade in downtown, there were three accidents. Three cars, in three different accidents were totally destroyed. I think one driver ran over two cars and a different tank driver ran over one car.

I was there with my camera to photograph them and it was scarey. No one was hurt because the tanks stopped just before crushing the drivers. In one, there was not an inch to spare. A tank had a crew of three or four men. The two main men were the tank commander and the driver. The tank commander watched and told the driver where to go and when to stop. The driver could only see through a periscope and had to depend on the commander for good directions. Remember, we only trained once a month and we didn’t drive the tanks very often. They were mostly driven for two weeks during the summer when we went to North Fort Hood Texas for maneuvers.

One more story about the National Guard before I move on. When we had our monthly drills, we would usually end them with a lot of beer drinking in the little club at the base. One weekend, we were all drinking pretty heavy and having a good time. When we decided to go home, I found out the guys I came with had already gone. This proved good for me because, the Army truck they took home had an accident and all were hurt. At least one died, maybe two, I don’t remember. There is not much protection in those Army trucks. They only have a canvas top and nothing to protect the men in case of a roll over and that’s what happened. I don’t know if they were drunk or not. The subject was never mentioned. From then on, I drove my own car and was careful about my beer drinking.



Riding on a tank at North Fort Hood Texas

Every summer we would go to North Fort Hood Texas for two weeks of maneuvers. That was like the real Army and we lived in tents and shot guns and played war. It was somewhat exciting. I would drive around in my jeep and photograph whatever I wanted to. I once rode on the back of a tank and tried to photograph while it was shooting its big cannon and machine guns. That was very noisy.

One of my last experiences in the guard was my last summer at Fort Hood. I was already married by then and my Brother-In-Law, Weldon Hudgins and my wife’s cousin were also at Fort Hood at the same time. My wife’s cousin was a Colonel in the medical section. That was John Cacey, a surgeon.

One weekend my Brother-in-law said he had a friend that could get us to Fort Worth for the weekend. I agreed to go with them and this guy drove over 100 MPH. I was scared.

When I was in High School, my grandmother let me move into a rent house she had in Poly. I think the idea was not to use it as a home, but a photo studio. I didn’t use it very long and Grandmother rented it to someone else.

This was about the time my old Black Kaiser blew an engine. It was very hard to find parts for a car that is no longer made. I traded it for a Studebaker. That didn’t last long and I traded it for a 1950 blue Pontiac convertible. I kept that car a lot longer.

Chapter 15

The Love of My Life

I have mentioned many of my loves and friends, but there is really only one that counts. That is Georgie Ann Record Lamb. After Loretta Humphries dumped me in 1954, I had no real girl friends. I don’t even remember having any dates until Georgie Record in 1956

Then there was the Mexican girl that was not allowed to date “white” boys. There was one more and I won’t mention her name because I may have been wrong about her, but Mr. Hamby and some of my friends thought I was right. In the winter of 1955 or 1956, there was a girl in Photography that suddenly started being interested in me. She wanted to be with me at every opportunity and tried to get me to “help” her in the darkroom, which of course was locked and with the lights out. After a few weeks of giving me a lot of attention, she quit school and disappeared. My teacher, Mr. Hamby told me she was pregnant and that’s why she was after me. I can assure you; I had nothing to do with that!

So, here’s the story of my last girlfriend. The beginning has been told once, but I will retell it from the start. When I did my “Morning Show” from the Speech Department at Tech, I had a fan named Dorothy Jones. Dorothy was a good looking blond and I was thinking about asking her for a date. I was finally over Loretta and wanted to get going again. Dorothy had started bringing a beautiful young girl with her to my show. The girl didn’t seem to be interested in me at all. I was not surprised because she was so beautiful and had a shape like Jayne Mansfield. Why would some lovely creature like that have any interest in me?



See what I mean? This is Georgia Record, My dream girl for life!!

One day I finally got up the courage to ask Dorothy out. I knew where she usually sat during lunch and I went there to talk to her. She was not there, but that beautiful girl was. I asked the girl where Dorothy was and she told me that Dorothy had quit school and got married. I lost another, but I was not too torn up this time, I was getting used to it. I then asked the beautiful girl to go with me to the Senior Picnic. She told me she was engaged, but she would consider it. I took that to mean, “In your dreams!”

A few days later, I saw her in the hall and I felt brave, so I hugged her. That was great, but I dismissed it because I figured I didn’t have a chance with her. After all, she was very beautiful and engaged. She was wearing an engagement ring and she said she was engaged to Vance Hurley, a reporter with the Fort Worth Press. Since I knew reporters were considered socially above photographers, I felt there was no chance for me.

Friday May 11, 1956 was the day of the Senior picnic. Since I was all alone, I caught the school bus and went to Burger’s Lake for the picnic. When I got there, I got in line for the food. It was catered by one of my favorite places, Walter Jettons Barbeque. While in line, a voice from behind me said, “Why didn’t you wait for me?” I was stunned; it was that beautiful girl that I thought I had no chance with. I told her I didn’t think she was serious about going with me and she assured me she was serious. I couldn’t believe it. Here I was in line to get the best barbeque in Fort Worth Texas and having a real date with the most beautiful and shapely girl in Tech High. I thought I had died and gone to Heaven. Well, I can assure you I have been madly in love with that girl since that afternoon of May 11, 1956.

We walked arm in arm all around that lake the rest of the day. I had to stop a couple of times to talk to some people. I asked her to wait for me while I talked to some friends a minute. What I was doing was asking various people what her name was. I was in such shock and I couldn’t remember it. I could only remember “Georgia”, which wasn’t her real name, but what she called herself. About 8:30, there was an announcement that the school buses were leaving and going back to Tech. She thought I had come in my car and I wasn’t thinking at all, I was just floating about 10 feet off the ground and I hadn’t been drinking at all, either.

Georgia later told me what happened. She was mad because she thought we had a confirmed date for the picnic and when I didn’t come and pick her up, she asked a classmate of hers to take her and her friend Mary Marr to Berger’s Lake for the picnic. The classmate she asked was a boy named Walter. This guy was not popular at all and was the only boy in Cosmotology. He thought that if he took Cosmotology he wouldn’t have any trouble getting dates. He was wrong.

Georgia asked him to take her and her friend Mary, and then get lost. That was the best Walter could hope for, so he agreed. After the buses left, the lake and she realized we had no way home, she went looking for Walter again, and sure enough, found him and told him to take us to the school. Although Walter couldn’t get a date, he was glad to be seen driving around with two good-looking girls. This trip though, he had me in the back seat with the beauty and he was in the front with another good looker, Mary Marr. That’s where I got the first of many thousands of kisses from this beauty.

When we got to the school, Georgia, Mary and I took my big black car and went to Georgia’s house in Poly on the East side of Fort Worth. Georgia told me to wait in the car, but she wanted me to lie down so her parents couldn’t see me. She told her mother she wanted to spend the night with Mary and Mary was waiting in the car to take her to Mary’s house. Georgia’s mother agreed, so we headed out to Mary’s house on the other side of Fort Worth.

About halfway to Mary’s house, we ran out of gas. Georgia, said, that’s not supposed to happen when Mary is in the car. I had to say, that it was true, we really were out of gas. I had to walk about two miles to get gas, so I started walking. A few minutes later, a man came up to the car and asked if he could help. The girls got scared and told him, no. Georgia then decided to lock the doors, roll up the windows and tell anyone else that came up that her husband had gone to get gas and he should be back any minute. A few minutes later, that happened, only this time, the man asked,” Isn’t this Bobby’s car?” She asked if he knew me and he said yes. She then told him where I had gone, so he said he would go and help me. It was not hard to spot my car. There

were not many big old black 1948 Kaisers  and to make it even stand out more, all across the back was “PRESS CAR” , as I was working for Reporter Publishing Company at the time.

As I was walking north on Universty Drive near Botanic Garden, my father drove up and told me to get in. He then asked if I had anything I wanted to tell him. I said, no, running out of gas was a common thing with me. I didn’t know what Georgia had told him. I got the car started and took them to Mary’s house. I then went home to dream about my fantastic day with the girl of my dreams.

The next day, I spend a lot of time trying to find the telephone number of that fantastic girl. I forgot her last name, so I had a lot of work to do to find her. I drove to her house to get the address, then back home to find the phone number that matched that address. That was a long process. The Fort Worth phone book was pretty big in those days. Finally, I found the address and when I saw the name, W.E. Record, I remembered her name was Georgia Record. I now had her name and phone number.

The previous night, Georgia’s mother had told her to be home by 10AM and she was, so I called her and asked for another date and to my amazement, she agreed to another picnic that afternoon, Saturday May 12, 1956. On the way to that picnic, I told her that I was going to marry her. She laughed and said she was too young. She was 16 and I didn’t care how young she was. I just reasoned with her that we could have a long life together. I didn’t mention it again for a few days.

When we got to the picnic, I found out what she had told my dad the night before. I introduced her to my family and when she met my dad, they said, “We have already met.” We all had a good laugh. That was the beginning of my life with Georgie Record.

A few days after starting my courtship with Georgia Record I met her family. The men in the family had some things that told me to be good to their girl. First thing her father, Earl Record did, when I met him was to tell me he had something he wanted to show me. He told me to follow him and he took me into his bedroom and to a closet there. He then opened the closet, took out two or three shotguns, and showed them to me. He didn’t have to say why he wanted me to see those shotguns, I understood it to mean, “You better treat my daughter right or I might have to use these guns.”

I met her brother that same day and he also made me nervous. Georgia said, “I want you to meet my brother.” At that moment, a man that looked like Elvis Presley wearing two pearl handled revolvers in fancy holsters and wearing nothing more than a pair of Jockey shorts came swinging into the living room swinging on the top of the door trim and landing right in front of me. He also didn’t have to say anything. I understood his actions to mean the same as his dad’s message to me.

Georgia’s mother was Cleo Record and she didn’t seem to like me at all. She just tolerated me and that was the best I could hope for. Cleo was not a very good cook and I was afraid she had raised Georgia that way too. No problem, I could teach Georgia to cook. I think the only thing Cleo ever cooked was white beans and without any seasoning. They were really very bland. The only thing that would help them was something I had never seen before. The family put a large glob of French’s Mustard on the beans and stirred it up. That made them edible. Georgie also had two sisters, one older and one younger. The older one was Jane and she was married to Weldon Hudgins and lived in the Poly area. The younger sister was Betty Jo and she was about the same age as my brother, Steve.

Chapter 16

More High School Stories

I got into speech in High School and did a lot there. We put on a play and I was the director. We also had a variety show and I was the comedy act. I was supposed to be an escape artist and I was locked into a straight jacket and supposed to get out in a few seconds. Of course, I couldn’t and between the acts, I would roll around on the stage acting like I was trying to escape. The show was about an hour and I never did escape. I got a lot of laughs. I also was MC for a lot of programs at the school.

In my senior year, I went to the counselor to prepare for my graduation. I filled out the papers and thought no more about it until just before graduation. I was called to the councilor’s office and told that I did not qualify for graduation. Someone had not kept track of my records until I applied for graduation. I was told that I was short a credit in English. It seems I had coasted through an English class and failed it in my early High School career. No one noticed it until now.

Being a professional photographer, I decided to make some money by photographing my friends as they graduated. I felt bad about my friends graduating and me there working. Anyway, I made a few dollars and saw my friends graduate. Georgia felt sorry for me, but I assured her that I would graduate the next year after I took a class in night school. I took the class and then went to graduate. I was shocked when it was discovered that there was still another class that had been overlooked. It didn’t seem worth it to go back to school for another class, so I just forgot it for a few years. Many years later while I was in the Air Force, I decided to finally graduate from high school, so I took the class I was told I needed to graduate. I completed the course and sent the paperwork to Tech High. When I expected to receive my diploma, I was shocked again when I got the answer and was told that the requirements for high school graduation had changed and now I needed even more classes. That was the last straw. I decided that I would never graduate, but by then, it was evident that a diploma was more important than it used to be. The one answer was GED, so I got my high school GED through the University of Maryland. After that, I got a college GED also. This came in handy later when I went to college. It seems odd that I am the only one in my family that did not graduate from high school, but have three college degrees. More about this later.

Chapter 17

After High School

Soon after I left high school, I changed jobs. Someone said I needed to build a credit history so I went to an employment agency and signed up for them to find me a job. After they found me a job, I would pay them by making payments and that would start my credit history.

I went to work for Bill Wood’s Photo Company. My immediate supervisor was Reginald “Phil” Philips. Phil was a good comercial photographer and a fair portrait photographer. He didn’t much care for portraiture, so I did most of the portraits there. Most of our work was commercial and we did ads for many different customers. Phil drove the official company car and I drove my own car. The car Phil drove had a large platform on the roof and a ladder. He would use that platform when he needed to get up high for a job.

The smallest camera we used was 4X5 and we always shot black and white. This was in 1956 and 1957. I learned a lot from working there and used that knowledge in my photo career. Probably the worst job I did there was to photograph the funeral of my boss’s father. I was not paying attention when I picked up a camera for this job. I picked up a camera that was synchronized for electronic flash and not sync for flashbulbs. I used large flashbulbs and of course, I had no images of the man or his funeral. Of course, this was not a job that could be redone. After a person is burried, they don’t want to dig him up again for a picture.



My First Full Time Photography Job at Bill Woods Photography

Phil liked the most challenging jobs, so he took one on that was very unusual. I helped him with this job and learned some new tricks. The assignment was to make a good portrait of a dead woman and make her look alive. We went to the funeral home and Phil made as good a portrait of a dead woman as he could. The greatest problem was to make her look alive. We couldn’t get her eyes open because she had been dead too long. The people had her made up for her funeral and she was stiff. We then rushed back to the lab, processed the film and made an 8X10 print of the portrait. Then Phil took me to a room I didn’t know existed and showed me hundreds of old photo paper boxes stacked everywhere. Phil said the boxes contained copies of all the jobs done by the company for many years. He then said to start looking for a portrait of a woman that looked similar to the dead woman and it had to be a similar pose, which was very difficult to find a good portrait of a live old woman that looked like the one we just did of an old dead woman.

After a few hours, I found one that looked similar to the dead woman. I took the negative to Phil and he put it in the enlarger and blew it up to the size of the dead woman. He put the dead woman’s portrait in the easel and focused the live eyes on her face to get the right size and position. After a few tests, he took the negative of the dead woman and put red opaque on the closed eyes, then made a print with no eyes. Then before developing the print, he put the negative of the live eyes back in the enlarger and printed them in place of the dead eyes.

It took many tries, but he finally made a pretty good print with the dead woman and the eyes of the live one. To make sure he did the best possible job, we made extra portraits of the live eyes and the dead woman and using an Exacto knife, cut out the live eyes and pasted them down on the dead woman. He then copied that portrait, retouched the negative, and made another print.

We then compared the two results and made another copy negative of what we decided was the best. Finally, with Mr. Wood’s approval, we made the final prints of the dead woman with someone elses eyes. The family was pleased. They finally had a portrait of the dead woman.

Phil didn’t like photojournalism, but I loved it and I got most of those jobs. One Friday afternoon, Mr. Woods came to the work area and asked if I had plans that night. I said I planned to be with my girlfriend (Georgia Record). He then asked me to take on an overtime job and of course, that meant more money, so I agreed. I was only making minimum wage ($1 per hour), so I could use the money. He told me to take a Poloroid camera, put a postage stamp on the upper left side of my windshield, and go to the back of the Will Rogers Auditorium.

I was confused, but tried to act as I did that sort of thing all the time. He explained part of it. He said he needed a fast portrait of Billy Graham, who was performing that night at Will Roger’s Auditorium. The postage stamp would be a sign that I was allowed to get into the “innersanctum” of the Billy Graham party. I felt a little silly taking a Poloroid camera out on a news job, but I did as I was told. I had to give the Polaroid prints to someone there. I was told someone would ask for them and I was to give them the prints. I never knew who they were for or where they were published. I assumed it was for some religious group.

Therefore, I did as I was told. I drove up to the stage door and a guard looked at my postage stamp on my windshield and let me in. From there I had to look for Graham. I found him backstage meeting with local religious leaders. They were all lined up like in a receiving line waiting to be presented to royalty, so, I just got in line and when he got to me, I would tell him I was there for a portrait.

I assumed he knew these people, but as he got closer, I noticed he said the same thing to all of them. He had a big fake pasted-on smile and said, “Oh Brother, it’s so good to see you, it’s been a long time.” When he said the same thing to me, I told him it was the first time I had ever met him and I was there on an assignment to get his picture. He stood there with a fakey grin and I shot a few shots of him and left. Some man met me at the door and asked for the Poloroids, so I gave them to him and drove straight to Georgia’s house.

Georgia thought Billy Graham was the greatest person in the world and was very excited to hear I had just talked to him. I told her that I thought he was a fake and she got very angry with me. When you see someone like Billy Graham on TV or in one of his programs, you don’t really get to know what he is really like, but when you get to meet them up close and personal, you can get to know them better. Some famous people are very nice and some are real jerks. I have photographed or met both types. Billy Graham was not one of the nice ones. He was one of the most Fake famous people I have ever met.



Billy Graham in his earlier years

After she cooled off, we went on with our courtship. It may have been Billy Grahams influence on her, but she was opposed to drinking. She knew I drank and she asked me not to. Once, I was going to Sherman to run around with my uncle Joe. When we got together, we always went to Oklahoma and drank a lot. Before I left, Georgia asked me to promise I wouldn’t drink. I said, “I promise I won’t touch it.” When I got to Sherman, we went to Oklahoma to do what we always did. This time though, I wore gloves while drinking. Joe asked what that was all about and I told him, I promised I wouldn’t touch a drink, so I had to keep my promise.

We dated steadily until we married. Georgia kept turning me down and wouldn’t set a date. Once she agreed to a wedding in December 1956. She then changed her mind. I once told her, I was tired waiting and walked out her back door. It took her only a few seconds to run after me. She told me not to give up, so I said OK.

Georgia’s mother, Cleo Record, told me that if I would leave and go somewhere like Chicago, and not return, she would give me $1,000. I refused and she told me that she thought I would probably win, but she was going to fight me to the end.

Georgie did not go back to Tech in the fall of 1956, but she went to Poly High School instead. She took classes that let her go to school in the morning and work in the afternoon. I would take her to work at Leonard’s Department store when I could.

When Mr. Woods died, the Bill Wood Photo Company started falling apart and I was laid off. I then found a job working at Seven Eleven. After training at the Seven Eleven Training store, I was assigned as assistant manager at the Richland Hills store. I worked alternating shifts; I worked morning one day and night the next.

One day in April 1957, I picked up Georgia to take to work. We were at the Dairy Queen, I had just taken the first bite of my “foot long hot dog”, and Georgia asked what I was doing next Saturday. I said, “Nothing” and she said, “Why don’t we get married?” I choked on my hot dog and when I recovered, I asked if she was serious. She said “yes!” I don’t know what I did the rest of the day.

We realized we needed a few more days to get ready. I had already bought the rings. Once I had worked for a pawnshop in Fort Worth. I would take watchs and jewelry they were overstocked on and I would take them to other pawnshops, pawn them, keep some of the money, and give the rest to my boss. Anyway, there was a nice wedding set, I got it for $125, and I could work off the price.

We also had to get the liscense and blood test., as well as find an apartment and a preacher. Finally we had it all planned and we dicided to make the date April 20, 1957. Georgia’s sister and brother-in-law, Jane and Weldon Hudgins lived in Haltom City Texas and they said we could get married at their house. They also got a preacher for us. My mother made us a wedding cake and Les Shelton said he would photograph it for us.

I really hate blood tests, but for Georgia, I would do almost anything. We went to a doctor that she knew for our tests. Hers went pretty easy, but mine took a long time because he couldn’t find a vein. He tried my right arm first, then my left arm and then back to my right arm and after twisting the needle around a few times, he finally found a vein and took out about a gallon. At least it felt like it. We then took our parents to the courthouse for the liscense. We were both under age so we needed our parent’s permission. I was 20 and she was 17.

We invited only family and a couple of close friends. We dressed in nice dress clothes and nothing too fancy. During the wedding, the preacher asked if anyone had any reason why we should not be married and my young cousin said in a loud voice, “I want to go home!” After the wedding and small reception, we left in our blue Pontiac convertble and went to the Shady Motel in Fort Worth. My uncle Clyde thought we were going to our apartment, so he rushed over there and hid under the bed for a few hours until he realized we were not going to the apartment that night.

 

This is at our wedding on April 20, 1957

Our first apartment was at 3300 Ave.M in Poly. It was a small place, but big enough for us. It had one room, a kitchen and we shared a bath. That first place costs us $30 per month. I found out Georgia could not cook, but I taught her. She also had other domestic deficiencies. I ask her to iron my pants for work. When she handed them to me, I couldn’t believe what I saw. The creases in the legs were indented, as if I had them on inside out. I asked what happened and she told me she ironed them as she always ironed her skirts. I asked her to show me and she turned her skirt inside out and showed me how she ironed. I told her that was OK for skirts because they didn’t have creases in the legs. She couldn’t see the difference until I showed her how to iron pants.

Georgia had never made gravy before either. Her first attempts were lacking. The gravy was very lumpy. My mother showed her how to do that and before long, her gravy was better than mine or Mom’s. She had thought everything came in cans. That’s the way her mother trained her. One night she opened a can of beets and warmed it up, giving it to me. I took one bite and told her, “I hate beets.” Thirteen years later she served them again and I said, “beets AGAIN?” and she finally understood!

After a couple months’ we thought our apartment was too small, so we started looking and found another one on Bishop Street. It was much larger. It had a kitchen, bedroom, bath and a living room with a fake fireplace. The Poly bus stop was right outside our door on Bishop Street.

Since we only had one car that was useful.

One rainy day I was going to work and it was raining very hard. As I was going to work at Seven Eleven, I noticed the water was over the road down near the river. I was driving through it and I had not remembered what my Dad told me about driving through water. He said, you have to ride your brakes to keep them dry, or they will fail. I discovered he knew what he was talking about. Suddenly I saw a line of cars stopped in the road. A tree had fallen across the road and they were stopped. I hit my brakes and guess what happened? I had to decide if I wanted to go into the river or hit that line of cars. I decided to hit the cars. The car I hit was shoved into the other car and it was shoved into the tree. It wasn’t long before a wrecker and a policeman showed up. The wrecker separated the cars and moved the tree. All of us had drivable cars after we pulled our fenders out away from our tires. The policeman said he was not going to give anyone a ticket and wrote it up as an un-avoidable accident. He said he wanted us to get out of there because the river was rising fast and he wanted to close the road. After we pulled the fender out, I drove on to work, where I had a flood in the store room.

My beautiful blue convertible would never be the same. When I turned in the accident to my insurance, I found out that I did not have collision insurance, only liability. Of course, I didn’t have the money to pay for the repairs myself.

I soon tired of working late at night and started looking for some other kind of work. I saw an ad in the paper for Fuller Brush Men. I checked it out and it seemed like a good deal, so I quit Seven Eleven and became a Fuller Brush Man. I loved one product, a silicone hand cream. I was able to sell it to all my clients, but I soon discovered I couldn’t make a living selling just one product.

When I was working, I had good credit, so I bought things I shouldn’t have. I had bought a transistor radio and a small TV from Leonard’s. I remember the radio was very over priced. It was one of the first transistor radios and it cost about $85. When I quit Seven Eleven and started selling Fuller Brush, I couldn’t make all those payments on the TV, Radio and the car. They were all repossessed and there went my credit rating. I don’t know where I got another car or even what it was, but I managed somehow.

My Brother-in-law, Weldon Hudgins was working for Gifford Hill selling cement. He told me he could get me a job for Gifford Hill in Wichita Falls Texas. As I think back on it, that might have been my Mother-in-laws idea. Anyway, Georgia and I packed up and moved north to Wichita Falls Texas. That was about 110 miles away and a big thing for a newlywed couple.

We found an upstairs apartment and moved in. That was not a big thing, since we didn’t have much to move.

I went to work the next day. I thought I would be working at a place like Weldon worked, I was wrong. The job Weldon showed me in Fort Worth was all done by machines and all the guy had to do was sitting at a console and works the machinery and make large concrete pipes. The place I was assigned to also make large concrete pipes, but the factory was new and they didn’t have the machinery there like they did in Fort Worth. The pipes were very large with an inside diameter of abour seven feet. They were made by making a large cage of steel and pouring cement into a large mold with the steel cage inside. My job was to roll the cage by hand from the place where the welder had made it, to the place where the molds were. I then had to “manhandle” the cage to get it on the mold and send it to where the outside of the mold was installed. It was then sent to where the cement was poured into the mold.

In two days, I tore up two work shirts by snagging them on the steel gages as I rolled them to the molds. The night of my second day of work, I was dirty, bloody and worn out. I was also running out of work clothes. On my way home, I bought a Wichita Falls newspaper and started looking for a better job. I found an ad for managers at Jiffy Food Store. That’s a lot like Seven Eleven and I had experience at that. The hours were not good, but a lot easier work and easier on my clothes.

I went to work at Gifford Hill the next day and decided at noon that was enough since I had torn up the third shirt. I thanked my boss for hireing me and quit. I then cleaned up and went to apply for the job at Jiffy. They hired me right away and I went to work the next day. The hours were no fun, but I didn’t tear a single shirt all the time I worked there.

After working there about a month, I found out the boss took his own inventory late at night. My store came up short and it was deducted from our salary. My partner told me that it was that way every month and he suspected the boss was robbing us. There were three keys to the store. I had one, my partner had one and the boss had one. Before it came time for the monthly inventory on my third month there, I jammed the lock that the boss had a key to and put another lock on with only two keys. The next day, the boss wanted to know why he couldn’t get in. Why did he need to get in at night, since he always came in before we closed to take the inventory? I had him figured out and decided I better start looking for another job.

We had been there a few months and had moved up to a better car and better apartment. I hated looking for other work, but if I didn’t I was going to get into it with my crooked boss. Our store was on the road to the Air Force Base and a lot of my customers were in the Air Force. I got to know some and we talked as they would stop for beer or snacks. I told them about my training as a photographer. They wondered why a photographer had such a bad work record and I told them how hard it is for a photographer to get work. Then one day, one of them asked why I didn’t try the Air Force and get back to photography. I asked how I could be sure I would get back to photography. He said, I should talk to the Air Force recruiter and see if I could get a guarantee to be a photographer.

One day after work, I went to see the recruiter and talk about it. He told me that if I could prove I had gone to photo school and get a letter from my teacher, Mr Hamby, I would have a good chance to get back into photography. The next morning, I went to work a little early and stopped off to sign up. I didn’t know what I was going to tell Georgia. After work, I went on home as usual and since it was late, I went straight to bed. Georgia was not asleep, so she asked about my day. While laying there in the dark, I told her about work and finally, I decided I had better tell her the rest. I said, “Oh yes, there was one more thing I did today. I joined the Air Force.”

She jumped out of bed, the lights came on and the fireworks started. All I remember was she kept on asking, “How could you do that with discussing it with me?” I wanted to get back to sleep, but she wouldn’t let me. I think that went on most of the night. I still had to go in and open the store and tell them about me quitting.

 

Working at Jiffy Food Store in Wichita Falls Texas

When I told my boss I quit, he said there would have to be an inventory. I figured there would be and I also figured there would be a great loss. He worked out the inventory so that he didn’t owe me anything. I was just glad to get out of there and that thief. I told my partner he should get away from that thief, but he was too meek to quit.

A few days later, I told my National Guard unit I was going regular. My Guard time helped me with pay and benefits. We then moved from Wichita Falls back to Fort Worth and into my parent’s house on Avenue N. Georgia would stay there until I finished Basic Training.

I went to Tech High to see Mr. Hamby and get that letter I needed to get back into photography. He was happy to see me continue in my photography career and he said he would gladly write a letter telling about my training.

Chapter 18

My Air Force Career

On October 10 1957, Georgia took me to the bus station in Fort Worth and I went to Dallas to take my physical and be sworn in to the USAF. That morning, I passed my physical and was sworn in. I was worried about the physical because of my asthma, but I made it. Then they were going to send us by bus to Amon Carter Field to catch a plane for San Antonio. Someone in my group asked if we could go to the airport with his parents. They said OK and we went to his parent’s house first, where his parents had a large table spread with all his favorite foods. We ate a lot, and then his parents took us to the airport.

We were on a commercial flight to San Antonio and they fed us on the plane. I was already stuffed, but I ate a little more. After landing at San Antonio Airport, we went by bus to Lackland AFB. As soon as we got there, they took us to the mess hall and fed us. I was about to get sick. Basically, we had eaten from about 5PM until 10 PM. I don’t think I had ever been so full.



Our first professional portrait after we got married. Georgia came to San Antonio Texas to see me in November 1957

Basic traing was no picnic, but it was easier for me than many others, because of my age and previous military experience. Although I was only about two years older than most of the men in my unit, I was still a lot more mature. I was also the only one with any experience and the only married man there. Training was strict as you might expect, but I found ways around a lot of things I didn’t want to do. For one thing, I had a lot of bad teeth and that came in useful when I needed to get out of anything.

When it was time for survival training, I had to get a tooth pulled. When it was time to take parachute training, I had another tooth problem. I once went to the hospital with pneumonia and that got me out of running around the track. If I had been forced to run, I would surely have been discharged with my asthma. I always managed to keep out of running and that kept me safe from discharge. I pulled a lot of tricks to get out of a lot of things. A lot of things people do in basic training, I never did.

I wanted to go to town and meet my wife there, so I joined the Air Force Choir. When they found out I had no voice, they said I could stay as long as I just lip synched the songs. That allowed me to get a pass and go to San Antonio and meet my beautiful wife. That’s when the portrait of us was made.

Once my DI (drill instructor) called me into his office. I was a little nervous because no one went to his office without being in trouble. I reported as instructed. Stand at attention, one hard knock on the door and wait for an answer. He said in a loud gruff voice, “Come In!” When I went in, I stood at attention and said, “Airman Basic Bobby D. Lamb reporting as ordered, sir!” He said, “Shut the door.” I thought I was really in trouble, but I couldn’t figure out why. He then said in a soft voice, “Sit down, I just wanted to talk to an adult for awhile, these kids are getting on my nerves.”

We just talked for about an hour. He told me about himself and I told him about me. He told me that he would get me a pass anytime I needed one to see my wife. I really felt good about being the “older” guy there.

Sometime in December, we went to a place to take tests to see what kind of work we were suited for in our Air Force career. Remember, I joined to get back to photography. I assumed the tests would prove that. I took all the tests and waited for the results. In about a week, we went back to the testing facility and were interviewed by the testers there. I expected him to tell me I would be a photographer. Was I shocked when he said I was suited for two different fields? He said I could be either a leather worker or plumber. I liked working with leather, but I hated plumbing. He told me how much money I could make when I got out of the Air Force as a plumber.

Now I am getting nervous. That’s when I gave him the letter from Mr. Hamby saying I was a trained professional photographer. I told him that the recruiter had told me that the letter was all I needed to get back to photography. The man seemed a little miffed that I didn’t want to do anything but photography. He said, OK, but you will have to take a test! I said OK, let’s have it. He said he would let me know when I could take the test. About a week later, I was told I had an appointment at the testing facility. Happily, I went there and I got out of another type of training I didn’t want to do. I did not have to go to tear gas training. That’s where everyone went into a building full of tear gas. We were to be wearing a gas mask and when told to do so, we were to take our masks off. I didn’t do it, but was told what I had missed. I was teary eyed that I had missed such a wonderful experience, HA!

I took the photography test and was surprised to see that it looked like it was written my teacher, Orton Hamby. It wasn’t, but Hamby took photo training in the military during WWII and the test was just like he taught. I asked the tester the results and he said in a gruff voice, “You passed!” I asked him my score and he said again in a gruffer voice, “You aced it! You will be a photographer!” He didn’t seem too pleased that I did so well.

About Decenber 22, we graduated basic training and were given our orders and a promotion to Airman 3rd Class. We were all excited about learning where we were going. I think everyone went somewhere different. A friend of mine from Alaska was assigned to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisianna and I was assigned to Keesler AFB in Biloxi Mississippi. Since I had to go right past his base to get to mine, I asked him to go home with me and spend Christmas with my family. He said OK and we caught the Santa Fe train for Fort Worth.

Chapter 19

My first Air Force Assignment

When we got to Fort Worth, we were met by my family and we went to my parent’s house. The old car we had was not in good shape, so I went to Georgia’s Dad for another car. He sold me an old Chrysler. I think it was a 1948 model. Mother was by then out of the bird business and now raising registered Pekinese dogs. She gave us one to take with us to Mississippi. His name was Oneyouchew Inkspot but we called him Inky. On December 30th, we left Fort Worth for our new assignment. Our first stop was Longview Texas to see Georgia’s Uncle Ray Record. Ray lived on a lake and since my friend was from Alaska, he thought the weather was warm enough for a swim. We couldn’t believe it when he went swimming in the lake. It was warm to him, but freezing to us.

Early the next day, we left for Mississippi. We dropped my friend off at Barksdale AFB and then we went straight towards New Orleans. I was getting tired, so I looked for a quiet place to take a nap. I noticed a cemetery on the outskirts of New Orleans and thought I might get a nap there and it should be quiet. Remember it was New Years Eve in New Orleans. When I got off the road, I realized the cemetery was locked up and it was a dead end road, so I tried to turn around and I got stuck in a ditch. I decided there was no way out that night, so I just went to sleep. About 2 AM, I awakened by a knock on my window. I rolled down the window and a drunk cowboy was there asking if he could help. I thought I had better take him up on his offer. He tied a rope around my bumper and to his truck. He pulled and pulled until the rope broke. He got another rope and did the same thing, again, it broke. Then, he told me he was in New Orleans for rodeo on New Years Day and the only thing he had left was his lariat that he used for his rodeo work. He said if his lariot broke, he was out of business for that New Years day rodeo. Well, the lariot didn’t break and we got out of the ditch. I asked him what I owed him and he said, “Have a drink with me.” I said OK and we stood there in the dark drinking whiskey. Georgia and Inky just stayed in the car.

We left the cemetery and headed for Biloxi. It was about 5 AM when we got there and too early to go house hunting, so we took another nap at a rest area on Highway 90 along the beach. About 8AM we went looking for a newspaper and found an ad for an apartment at 915 North Main St. in Biloxi, about a block from the Back Bay. It was a garage apartment owned by a Miller Beer delivery man named Curtis Fountain. The apartment was furnished, so we moved right in and went to bed.

The next day, January 2, 1958 I went to the Base and signed in. I went to work right away at the Base Photo Lab. My boss was Tech Seargent Mike Solomon, a slick man with Middle East ancestry. I fit in fast and was soon back in the swing of things with my hands back on a camera.

 

One of my first jobs was shooting aerials and I also did portraits like the one above of Inky and me. I was now Airman 3rd class Bob Lamb

Chapter 20

Some of My Assignments

I had done aerial photography before the Air Force, so it was nothing new. I had training at Tech in shooting aerials too. I knew some things the other photographers didn’t know. One thing was the way I held the camera and I always sat of a soft cusion to absorb the vibration of the aircraft. Since I didn’t have to worry about depth of field, I always used a wide aperature and that allowed me to use a fast shutter speed. Since my aerial work was always sharper than the other photogs, I got almost all the aerial jobs.

Another of my specialties was photographing dead people. Remember I had experience with dead people since I was about 8 years old. I once asked why I got all the hospital jobs and I was told it was because I was the first one that didn’t get sick and my work was always good. There came a time when I started hateing to work on dead people and I finally started trying to get out of those kinds of jobs. I almost never photographed a dead person after my daughter died in 1963. I think I only did about two jobs in a funeral home since then.

I photographed some plane crashes too. Once I had to shoot my own chopper in the Back Bay. It had crashed while practicing “auto rotations”. I was pretty nervous when I experienced my first “auto rotation”. An auto rotation is when you are at a high altitude and you shut off the engine. Then as you drop, the rotation of the blades is supposed to slow you down to a manageable drop.

In practice, you would re-start the engines before you dropped too close to the ground and then make a smooth landing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work and that’s what happened when my chopper went into Back Bay. Fortunately, the water in Back Bay was shallow at low tide and that left about half of the chopper was out of water. There fore, I had to crawl around in the part above water and do close up photos of the engine to see if we could tell why the engine did not re-start like it was supposed to.

I was once called to shoot another aircraft crash in the Back Bay. This time it was a C-45 that had taken off and had engine failure and crashed upside down in Back Bay. Again it was at low tide and the plane was only half submerged. I was flown out to the site in my favorite chopper, a H-21. I put my equipment in a pack and put it high on my back. Then I waded out to the aircraft and started shooting. The water was about waist deep and I was able to shoot everything I needed to. After being in the water about an hour, I started burning everwhere I was wet. Suddenly it dawned on me, I was standing in gasoline soaked water up to my waist.

The flying safety officer was Major Pat McMannus and he was on shore waiting for me. By the time I waided to shore I was starting to hurt a lot. The gas was burning me. Major Mac said he lived close by and he drove me to his house where I could shower the gas off. After the shower, I put something he gave me all over my lower body and I stopped burning. The next problem was, I had nothing to wear. I was larger than him, but he said he had a large flight suit he never wore and gave it to me. Of course, a Major’s flight suit had gold oak leaves on the shoulders, so I was now wearing an illegal uniform. Major Mac didn’t have any shoes or hat that fit me, so I was just running around barefoot and bare headed with a Major’s uniform on.

Major Mac took me back to the crash site and I got on the chopper for the return flight to the base. When we landed, there was a young leutenant there waiting on the chopper. He saw me get off in my new major’s uniforn and he rushed up and saluted me. I returned the salute and said,” Would you get me a staff car right away?” He said, “Yes sir!” and I rode back to the photo lab laughing all the way at that leutenant. I usually walked from the flight line to the lab, but I thought it would be fun to ride in style for a change and anyway, I was barefooted.

Another funny thing happened that day. It was my turn to empty the trash at the photo lab. I got a lot of stares when I walked bare footed to carry out the trash about a half block away. Here was a Major, with no shoes or hat carrying out the trash. I bet a lot of people wondered about that.

I also did a lot of work for OSI, (Office of Special Investigation). My job was as a photographer, but I did some detective work too. Late one night when I was “on alert”, an assignment all the photographers did, I got a call to report to OSI. When I got there I was told to wait in one of the offices. I heard two men talking and in a few minutes, a very strange man came into the room. He was wearing a long wig, skirt, slippers and a peasant blouse. He also was wearing makeup. The weird one stood at one side of the room, just inside the door and the agent came in and said, “Make some pictures of him.” As I started to focus on him, he turned ¾ and pulled down the top of the blouse off the shoulder and smiled. I tried to keep from laughing, but it was hard. As I was leaving, I had to walk right past him and as I did, I said, ”BYE!”. As I was saying it, my voice cracked and it sounded as if I was mocking him in a high pitched voice. I had barely cleared the door, when I broke out in a loud laugh and I laughed all the way home.

Another OSI story was when we had to go to a part of the base that bordered Back Bay and photograph a “grisly” find. They were extending the runway and were filling in the swamp there. As they were digging, they turned up a human arm. We photographed it and wondered about the rest of the story. About six months later, I ask an agent if they ever found the rest of the body. He said I had to keep it a secret, so I said OK. It’s been many years now, so I guess it’s OK to tell what happened. The hospital had amputated a mans arm due to some disease and when they went to put the arm in the incinerator, they found it was not working, so someone just took it out to the swamp near the Back Bay and threw it in. There were many alligators out there and they figured one would just eat the arm and that would be it. The hospital staff didn’t know that they were going to excavate the swamp the next day. Mystery solved and Hospital staff embarrassed.

The subject of me getting all the dead people jobs was discussed and one of the photographers, Dolores Kindazora, said she wanted a chance at doing those jobs. The boss said, “OK, you go with Lamb on the next one.” She agreed and the next time I had to go, she went with me. It was a man who had drowned and was stuck in some underwater brush. He was there about a week and smelling pretty bad. His body was also badly eaten by crabs and fish. We went to the morgue and when we got there we were given surgical masks, not for sterility, but to help with the smell. As soon as they pulled out the slab, my partner left and said she didn’t think she could ever shoot that kind of job. I had to ask for another mast. One mask did not cut out enough smell.

When I photographed dead people, I just kept telling myself that what I was shooting was no longer a person, just a lage piece of meat. That helped me do my job. There was a job I did once where the “Meat” thing didn’t work. A bomb maker was hired to make a bomb to kill someone. The bomber was to deliver the bomb from Florida to Texas. Something happened over the Gulf of Mexico and the bomb blew up killing all on board. The recue crew was only able to get 9 bodies and a few parts. They told me they were about to get one more body, when a large shark came up and took it away. The plane went down not far from New Orleans, but we had the largest morgue and they decided that we should take care of the bodies. A group of forensic pathologist from the FBI was flown in to do the autopsies and of course, I was sent in to photograph the autopsies. This was my worst forensic job. Families of the victims found out where the autopsies were being held and many of them came to the morgue where we were working.

The FBI must have sensed that I was not doing too well on this job, so they said I could wait outside until they were ready for me. They decided to work on one at a time. When they got the body ready, they called me in to shoot it. Two shots on each side. I would shoot one side then they would turn it over and I would shoot the other side. Then occasionaly, I had to make close up shots of something, like a burn or an unusual marking. The job got even harder when I finished one body and went out to wait for the next. That’s when the family members would come up and ask if I just worked on someone that looked like so and so. It was really hard for me to talk to them. I couldn’t tell them what the bodies looked like. No one could tell from looks who a person was. They were too mangled. The FBI took dental Xrays and made lists of every piece of clothing they could tie to each body. I think they had everyone identified in a couple of days. That job took me all day to shoot and I started smoking cigarettes at that time. I needed something to calm me down after each body. When I went home that night, I told my wife I didn’t want to eat any meat until further notice. I am a world class carnivore, so she knew how bad that job must have been.

I had just about stopped thinking about that job until 9-11-2001 and when I remembered that job and all those loved ones, I just broke down and cryed very hard for about an hour. That’s when I discovered I had PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Before 9-11-2001, I thought PTSD was just something the psychirotrists dreamed up. But I now realize, it’s real.

I photographed a few more dead people, but now, I was not volunteering for the jobs. There was a test flight of a new aircraft from Fort Worth Texas that crashed near Hattisburg Mississippi. Of course we were the closest government facility, so we were called in to investigate and I had to go photograph it. There were three men on board and as they were flying over Mississippi on a test flight, the crew heard the pilot say over the intercom, “Prepare to eject. Three, Two, One, Eject.” They all ejected but did not know why. They were all in pods that shot them up away from the aircraft and then they came down in their parachutes for a safe landing. That is all, but the pilot that started the abort. His chute did not open and his seat did not separate, so he came down on his head and that part was smashed up pretty bad. I had to photograph him at the local hospital. I thought it was pretty amazing that although his body had such damage, his Timex watch was still running two days later. It took two days to find him.

That job was about to mess up my plans. As you might remember, I have been a jazz fan a long time and Louis Armstrong was coming to Keesler AFB for a concert about the time of that plane crash. That was a week long job and the day Louis was coming, I was still on that job in Hattiesburg Mississippi. I had to do something to get there, so I told a chopper pilot I had to get back to the base and he flew me there. Someone else had already started shooting the job when I got to the show. I probably shouldn’t have changed clothes. At least I got to meet Louis and get his autograph and talk to him. Unfortunatly all he wanted to talk about was the job I was doing on the plane crash and since it was an experimental aircraft, it was all too secret and I couldn’t say much about it.

There’s another story here about Lois Armstrong. It seems that the band did not have much money and they needed the money they made that night to find a place to sleep. I offered my apartment, but Louis wanted to keep the band together. He asked me if I could get his check cashed so he would have the cash for a motel in Mobile. The closest motel for Black People was in Mobile Alabama. Even someone as famous as Louis Armstrong had trouble in the South. Anyway, I took his road manager around to all the places I thought might have enough money to cash his check. I finally got it cashed at the Keesler Officers Club. It was a good thing I was well known all over the base. So I did my good deed for Louis Armstrong.

Unfortunately, with all this going on, I didn’t get to see much of the show. I loved being able to meet and photograph people like Louis Armstrong. I wish I had been able to shoot the show and get some shots of Louis too. At least I have two shots that were made by another photographer at the Base lab.



I really enjoyed meeting Louis Armstrong and being able to help him get enough money to find lodging for him and his band.

I got to meet a lot of entertainers and other famous people. Lionel Hampton was a very nice man and I got to talk to him a lot between sets. He had a unique way for him and his band to take breaks. The music never stopped, because they took breaks one or two at a time, so the music went on for about two hours.

Ray McKinley took over the Glen Miller Band and played at Keesler once. Also Bob Hope’s band leader, Les Brown played there as well as many others like Ralph Marterie, Jack Teagarten and many others.

I also photographed some movie stars, like Tex Ritter. Some young people may not know who Tex Ritter was. Many know about his son, John Ritter. They both died young. Once Tex was booked to give a show at the base theater. I was called in to photograph it. While I was back stage talking to Tex, the manager came in a little embarrassed and told him that he didn’t have to perform and he could just move on to the next town or go home. Tex wanted to know why he was being dismissed and the manager, again embarrassed, told him that the show was due to start in five minutes and there were only about 10 people in the audience. That’s when Tex said something I will always remember and that said a lot about his character. He said,” Those 10 came to see me and I will give them the same show I would give a thousand people.” He then told me he would need my help.

Tex would go out on the stage and sing a couple of old cowboy songs. He was dressed as a movie cowbow with revolvers. He then wanted me to come up on the stage and photograph him. At that point he would say, “You shot me, now I’ll shoot you.” Then he would pull out his gun and shoot me. Naturally it was loaded with movie blanks. The problem was that when he shot me, a piece of the red hot wadding hit me right in the eye and I was hurt. He thought I was acting, but I was really hurt. So I have always said I was shot by the famous western movie star, Tex Ritter.



Tex Ritter, the singing cowboy star

In those days we didn’t have much money and we had to be creative for entertainment. The USO always had something for us to do, so we went there often. We played Bingo at the USO every week and went to their dances on Saturday night. When we played Bingo, we usually won something and it was usually food. We often won hamburger coupons.

Georgia was pregnant with our firstborn, Robert and getting pretty big by now, but we went dancing anyway. She was always one for joking, so one of her jokes was to make sure some of the old ladies at the USO could hear her and she would say to me, “You promised to marry me, now look at me. When ARE you going to marry me?” We used to get a lot of stares from those old ladies and Georgia loved it.

One form of entertainment was fishing and swimming. We also liked to take an Air Force boat to Ship Island, about 20 miles off the coast of Biloxi. There we would swim and fish in very clean and clear water. The water around Biloxi was not clear or very clean . Sammye, Robert and I loved the clean water around Ship Island.

Beach Boy Robert 



Ship Island, off the coast of Mississippi. Near Biloxi

Another form of entertainment in those days was the local movie theater. There was always a double feature on “Family Night” and that was only 30 cents each. After awhile, we decided that we were spending too much money on movies and we decided to get a TV set. We found one at a used appliance store in Biloxi. We got the man to give us a guarantee on it. He said OK, he would guarantee it for 30 days. On the 29th. Day, it went out. He didn’t want to honor the guarantee, so I turned it over to Georgia. She turned him every way but loose and he repaired the TV. She was good at getting things done that I couldn’t.

She thought we should get a baby bed and we went shopping for one. She found one near the apartment and she also saw a rocking chair there. She talked the owner of the store down to $60 for both. He finally agreed and we bought them. She then said he could deliver them to our apartment just down the street. He said, “We don’t deliver.” Guess what? He delivered. Sammye could do anything. That was our first furniture.

Just before Robert was born, my mother came to help Sammye. Mother came about the time he was due, but it was two more weeks before he finally made an appearance. I always said he was late getting born and he has continued to be late ever since. Mother said maybe we needed to get Sammye to run up and down the beach to get that baby started. We didn’t but we did a lot of walking.

On November 11, 1958, Robert Lesley Lamb was born at the Keesler AirForce base Hospital. Sammye was in labor for a long time. This is a good place to explain how, Georgie/Georgia became Sammye. When she was pregnant, she was a little touchy and I would call her different names just to cheer her up. Once, when I called her Samson, she hit me and would not cheer up. I told her that if she didn’t cheer up, I would have to call her Sam the rest of her life. I have always been a man of my word, so I renamed her Sam. She renamed herself Sammye because it was more feminine.

We are now a little family of three. It was interesting that not long before Robert was born, I was sent out to get some shots of the hospital. I shot it from many different angles, as well as some aerials of the hospital. They decided on the aerial and Robert got one of the first birth certificates with my aerial photograph on the cover.



Keesler AFB Hospital



Here is little Robert with his proud parents

It didn’t take Robert long before he was crawling all over the house. We were a little nervous about that because we were still living in that upstairs apartment.

When I took Sammye to the hospital for Roberts birth, she met another Air Force wife in labor. Her name was Rae Ussack. Rae had a premature girl about the same time as Robert was born. We got to be friends with the Ussack family and they introduced us to a man who wanted someone to share his house. I don’t remember that man’s name, but I remember a lot about him. His wfe had committed suicide by hanging herself. After we moved in with that man, I understood why she might have done it. He was a real weirdo. We would share the groceries and he always wanted unusual things. He was also a vegitarian and we were not. It was a little difficult to figure out how to devide the expenses in a fair way.

After about two months living with this weirdo, we decided we had to move out. We found an apartment on Water Street in Biloxi and we moved. Our new landlady was a weird one too. The apartment was very old and had never been updated. All the apartments in the house had very old water heaters. They did not have thermostats on them and you would have to light them about an hour before you need hot water and then turn them off as soon as you were through with hot water. If they were left on, the water would heat up all the way back up the cold water lines and I guess they would eventually heat all the water in town if they were not turned off. We always did as told and turned the water heater off when we were through with it.

One day our mean old landlady came up the stairs and banged on our door. She wanted to know who had left their heater on. We convinced her it was not us. She told us what happened. She was on the comode and when she flushed it, very hot water came out and steamed her butt. Our neighbor had left hers on and heated all the cold water in the apartment house.

The neighbor across the hall from us was a single woman and we suspect she was “A lady of the evening.” One night we had company and were probably making a little noise. The landlady came up banging on the door and demanding to know if Sammye was entertaining men while I was gone. About that time I came out from behind the door and sent her on her way. By the way, Sammye was pregnant again and starting to show at this time.

I want to tell another funny story that happened while we lived the on Water Street. I had started a part time job at a laundymat in Biloxi and I did all our laundry there. I came home one night with our laundry and as I was getting it out of the back seat, I saw a bra under the seat. I didn’t remember washing it and it looked too small for Sammye. Now I had a dilemma. If it was not hers, what would she do to me for finding this under the seat in our car? If I threw it away and it was hers, I would be in trouble for that. What to do? I decided I had better take care of this very carefully. I decided that if I was perfectly honest with her, I might have a better chance. I explained to her that I found it under the seat and I didn’t want to take a chance at getting in trouble with her. She looked at it and saw that it was very small. She said that she was not worried, because I would never have anything to do with a woman that wore a bra that small. We just figured it was left in the dryer and that’s how it got in our laundry. Anyway, I was nervous about that until she explained why she wasn’t worried.

While working at that Laundromat, I learned about how bad prejudice was in Mississippi. There was a Black woman that worked there too. One night I finished my work about the same time as she did. She was going to walk home, but it was a long way, so I offered to take her home. She accepted and got in the back seat of my car. I told her to sit up front with me and she told me that if she did, we would both get into trouble. She said that if some people saw it, they might stop us and beat us up or if the police saw it, they would give us a $25 fine. I was shocked and disgusted with the stupid people there.

We had just about had it with that crazy landlady on Water Street by now, so we started looking for another place to live. We found a nice house out in the country east of Ocean Springs Mississippi. The house was not furnished, so we had to buy some furniture. Except for the rocking chair and baby bed, that was our first furniture. We moved out there and loved it living in the country. We had artisian water that ran all the time in the front yard. It was cool and tasted good. We also bought our first washer and dryer.

I guess we must have been doing pretty good financially to be able to have our own furniture and we also bought our first new car. We bought a 1960 Fiat 600.



Here we are waxing our new Fiat 600. We didn’t have it too long. I totaled it out one morning on my way to work.

When Robert was born, it was discovered that the combination of Sammye’s blood and mine caused our children to have the RH factor and we were warned that we should not have any more kids. Sometime in 1959 we discovered that Sammye was pregnant again. Due to the RH problem, the doctors said we needed to have periodic blood tests. We went to the hospital at least once a month for blood tests. I really hated that because they had such a hard time finding my veins and it really hurt a lot.

I never did understand why I had to have all those blood tests. If the damage was done, it was already done and what difference did it make to keep having blood tests? But I did anyway and never questioned why.

Our second child, Valerie Lynn Lamb

On Febuary 14, 1960, Sammye went into labor with our dear daughter. I rushed her to the Keesler Air Force Base hospital. My mother had come down to Mississippi to help me with Robert when Lynn was born. As soon as she was born, they did blood test on her and decided that she did not have the RH factor and we were relieved. Also, I stopped having those painful blood tests every month.

We named our kids before we even married. Robert Leslie was named for my best friend, Leslie Shelton and our daughter was to be named Danna Jean after Les Shelton’s wife, Jean.

I don’t know what came over my wife, but while she was still in the hospital and I wasn’t there she changed the name and she named our daughter Valerie Lynn Lamb. When the nurse came into her room and asked what she wanted to name her, my wife asked how many first names she can have. The nurse said. “As many as you want.” My wife said, “Three names, Mary Hadda Lil and of course the last name is Lamb.” Of course this was a joke. If it had been recorded that way our daughter would have been Mary Hadda Lil Lamb. She stopped the nurse and told her it should be Valerie Lynn Lamb. This was amazing because we had always planned on naming her Danna Jean. The first name was a combination of our middle names, Dan and Ann.

While my wife and daughter were in the hospital, I decided to move further into the country. We had discussed the move, but nothing was settled about when we would move. I wrote about our old friends back in Texas, the Sheltons. Jean Shelton’s sister and their family lived on a farm near Saucier Mississippi. Although it was about 30 miles from work, I liked the idea of country living and having pigs, chickens and a garden.

There was a snag to this move though. The family we would be renting from was still living in the house. My wife was not too happy about that.

When Mother and I went to get Sammye and Lynn from the Hospital, Sammye said, “I’ll be glad to get back home to Ocean Springs.” Mom said, “We don’t live there anymore, Bob moved you way out in the country.” Sammye was surprised and a little angry, especially when she found out that the Odom family had not moved out yet.



Our little family in February 1960

Living in the country near Saucier Mississippi was different. We were so far out in the country that we didn’t have phone service. The area was also full of moonshiners and real “Hillbillys”.

The place we rented from the Odoms was a house that was heated by a fireplace and was on an acre of land. It had a barn, a chicken house and about a half acre garden. When we first moved there we had to put everything we owned in one or two rooms since the Odom family was still there. They were going to move to a dairy about a mile away, but they had not finished their house when we moved in. In about a week, Sammye told the Odom family they were moving that day and they did. Sammye was always good about getting her way.



We had a lot of exitement while living there. I was often sent out to do aerial photography and I asked the crew to go out to my new home, so I could shoot it from the air. We flew out there and circled the place and I shot a lot of pictures of our place. When I got home that night, my neighbor, Huston Ladner, told me I almost got shot out of the air. It seems that as we flew over the house, some of my “moonshiner” neighbors were about to shoot us down. My neighbor saw it was me and stopped the Hillbilly moonshiner from shooting us. They thought we were “Revenoors”.

Since we were in the country, I wanted everything country and that included chickens, hogs and a large garden. We used to listen to a radio station from Del Rio Texas and they advertised 100 chickens for $15. You send them the money and the postman delivers the chickens in a few days. I wanted the chickens for eggs. I did not know that the company that sent the chickens was an egg company and they only sent roosters. I couldn’t tell they were roosters until they grew up. Anyway, I could use them for meat.

That 100 baby roosters didn’t last long though. First, there was a flood that killed some. When I got home from work, Sammye said, I saved some of the chickens. She had three in the house in a box and I asked about the others, she said, “I don’t know, I was spending all my time taking care of these.” I went to the barn and found about fifty floating in water and mud. I saved two of those that were not quite dead.

I also lost some of my chickens to hogs. A neighbor asked if I wanted some pigs and I said yes. I didn’t realize they were wild and very mean and they would dig under the fence and grab any unsuspecting baby chicken that was near.

Not long after we moved to the country, I got hurt. I had been up late taking care of Lynn and on my way to work, I went to sleep and ran off the road and into two pine trees. When I woke up, I was in a lot of pain. My arm was broke and my throat was also hurt. I don’t know what I did to my arm, but I broke the steering wheel with my neck. I hitchhiked to town and got dropped off at a friend’s house and he took me to the hospital. Someone from work took me home and when I got out of the car, Sammye came running out and said, “I knew you would fall out of that helicopter some day!”

One day while I still had my arm in a cast, I decided to carry out the trash and burn it. The wind got up and the fire got away from me. I called for Sammye to come and help me, but she said, “Wait until I get my hair up!” That took too long and I was getting scared, so I got the plow and tried to cut a furrow so the fire would stop at the fresh broken ground. It was very slow trying to push a plow with my belly while trying to guide it with one hand.

I was not too successful stopping the fire and it started spreading like “WILD FIRE”. When Sammye finally gor her hair up, I needed her to go get help. Our little one acre place was on the edge of a national forest and the forest rangers were on it like “ugly on an ape!” When Sammye ran to the neighbor’s house to ask for help, he said, “See that cloud of dust?” It was the National Forest Firefighters with their big equipment. They had a new firebreak cut in minutes and the fire was out.

We had lots of excitement in that country home. It got pretty cold up there in the winter and early Spring. The only heat we had was a fireplace and good firewood was scarce. I found a cherry log and decided it was hard wood and should burn all night. The trouble was, I couldn’t get it started. Finally I did a stupid thing and poured gas all over the log. Then couldn’t fing any matches. When I finally found a match, the fumes had crept out all over the living room. That living room had a shag carpet and lacy curtains on the windows. The whole family was in the living room waiting for a good fire when I struck the match. The entire room was in flames in about a half second. Curtains were burning along with the shag rug and the cherry log on the fire. Sammye screamed, “You’ve killed my babies!” Then as soon as I pulled down the burning curtains and stomped out the shag rug, it was all over and the house was warm and Sammye was HOT! We had a little smoke damage and no curtains or rug, but that crisis was soon over.

Another experience was when Sammye went out in the back yard to hang some clothes and saw a snake. She yelled, “SNAKE!” and I came running. I didn’t ask what kind of snake, I just grabbed the ax with my good right hand and threw it like a tomahawk. It went about 50 feet and landed on the snakes head. After I inspected the dead snake, I discovered it was just a harmless black snake and I shouldn’t have killed it because it ate rats and we had plenty.

Our rats bring to mind another story. We had a lot of rats in our barn and no snakes to kill them. I decided I needed a large cat and that would help the rat problem. I was still healing from my car wreck and my left arm was still in a cast, but I could drive with Sammye’s help and we went to Biloxi to the animal shelter to find a large cat.

I asked the man in charge if he had any large cats and he said yes. He then went to the cages and I heard a loud comotion, then saw him pulling a large rope and on the other end of the rope was a large black cat with his claws dragging on the concrete floor. After a little more noice, the man came in carrying a large cardboard box with a lot of noise comeing from the inside. I asked what I owed for the cat and he said, “Anything you want to give.” I said, “How about a quarter?” and he said, “OK!”

With the kids in the back seat with the cat box and Sammye in the passenger’s seat shifting the gears for me, we headed west to take our new rat killer home. It was getting dark as we were driving west on US 90 and suddenly with a loud noise, the cat escaped the box. It was still cold, so we had the windows up. Sammye screamed and the cat jumped on my head and started clawing my scalp. I yelled at Sammye to put the cat in the box and she yelled something back at me about that cat killing her babies. I carefully stopped and grabbed the box putting it over my head and trapping the cat and my head inside. Finally, I got a little help from Sammye and we managed to close the box with the cat inside. She held the box the rest of the way home and I put it in the barn and locked the door. I expected to find a full satisfied cat the next day, but instead, I found only some rats in the barn and no cat. I never saw that cat again and I still had rats.

After that I found a very powerful rat killer and spread it out on the barn floor. That worked, but as they were dieing, they went toward the pig pen and some of the poisoned rats were eaten by the pigs. It didn’t kill them, but they were sick for a few days.

By now I had very few chickens left and they still continued to dissapear. I would find the chicken fence pushed out in the morning, so I knew something was getting them at night. A neighbor had a good hunting dog and loaned it to me. He said the only thing that dog was afraid of were the large black panthers they lived in the forest. My neighbor tied the dog up to the chicken fence and left a 55 gallon barrel for the dog to sleep in. The next day, the dog was cowering in the barrel and would not come out. That’s when I discovered that there were panthers near by. Sammye saw one one night when she heard a loud scream that sounded like a woman screaming. Black panthers scream like a woman in trouble.

One more mishap was when Robert drank some sun tan lotion. Sammye asked the neighbor to take her to the town to make a phone call. There were no phone lines out there where we lived. She called the hospital and they told her how to take care of the problem. That night Sammye told me that she was moving back to civilization and I was welcome to join her. The next day we went house hunting back down towards the coast. We found a house to rent at 2020 South Street in Mississippi City. We moved in soon after that. This house had air contiioning and heating as well as we can now have a telephone like civilized people.

We had a small laundry room and I set it up as a combination laundry room and darkroom. I also used the kids bedroom as a photo studio. While living there we went through a number of neighbors. Across the street was a fellow photographer and his Japanese wife. The family on our east side had the first color TV I had ever seen. We rode out a hurricane at their house once. We were on a trip to New Orleans and we found out a hurricane was headed for the Mississippi Gulf Coast. When we found out about it, we turned around and headed back home. Our neighbors had already boarded up their house and told us we didn’t have time, so we had better stay with them. Sure enough, it hit shortly after we got home and closed up the house.

During the eye of the storm, I went out to photograph some of the damage. I got back to our friends house just before it hit us from the other side. After it was all over we surveyed the damage and discovered we had no damage to our house even though it was not boarded up, but our neighbor had broken glass even though his house was boarded up. You never know.

In the winter of 1961, we got a call from my Mom telling me that my Great Aunt Alice Spelce had died and we should go to Byres Texas for the funeral. I got an emergency leave and we loaded up the car and headed out. The weather was warm in Mississippi, but we heard it was very cold in Texas. A friend loaned me his tire chains and we took them along with some warm clothes. When we got to Louisiana, the weather was getting colder and we soon ran into ice on the road. I put on the tire chains and we continued on. Somewhere near Monroe Louisiana one of the chains broke and I stopped to try to find it. After I gave up, I discovered the car would not start again. We were stranded in the dark near the top of a hill. It was a dangerous place to stall out due to the darkness and ice on the road. Sammye and I pushed it off the road and into the ditch. Now we are in trouble. We didn’t have many warm clothes with us and it was getting colder. I decided we had to get creative, so I looked around in the dark and saw a light about a mile away. I told Sammye I would walk to that light and get some help. I went to the house and told my sad tale to the old farmer there. He invited us to spend the night with them. The place looked something you might see in a “Ma and Pa Kettle Movie”. I went back to the car and told Sammye, “You won’t believe this place.” She thought it was a mansion or something. It was about as opposite as you can get.

We carried the kids and walked through the snow up to the house. The room we went into was very warm. It was heated by an old wood stove and they had plenty of firewood. Almost all of the family was in that room because it was the only room that was heated. The couple had 13 living kids. They had lost a few due to accidents and sickness. They were very friendly and we appreciated them taking us in. The older ones sat around the stove smoking and drinking coffee. At about midnight the man told me that I needed to rest because there was a lot I had to do the next day. He showed me to another room that had a bed in it and the bed was full of snow because the room only had three walls. I crawled into the bed wearing all my clothes and I was grabbed by what I assumed was a young boy in the bed. He or it, said, “Papa” and I said, “Go back to sleep”. I then went to sleep myself. Sammye and the kids stayed in the room with the rest of the family for the rest of the night.

The next morning, The sun was shining bright when I woke up and it was warming up just a little. The man invited me to have breakfast with the rest of the family. Most had already eaten and the woman was in the kitchen with Sammye making biscuits and gravy. It was still very cold and when she handed me a plate with a biscuit on it, I was looking forward to the gravy, but when she put gravy on the biscuit, it congealed into a mass of grease on a biscuit.

After I ate all I could of the biscuit and grease, the man took me to town in his pickup. I was broke and the man said he was almost broke, but he would split what he had and then handed me a dollar bill. The man took me to a phone and I called my dad and he wired me some money to take a train to Texas. The old farmer then towed my car into town with his tractor. A mechanic told me that the rotor cover was cracked and that’s why it wouldn’t run, but the real problem was that there was not enough antifreeze in the engine and the block was cracked. I told him I would get back with him after the funeral and we could decided what to do. After that the farmer took me back to his farm house to get the family. When we got there I saw the room where most spent the night was full of soot. It turned out that the stove pipe broke and soot went all over Lynn and her only coat. The old man then took all of us to the railroad station in town and we caught a train for Shreveport.

When we got to Shreveport we found out that the train for Dallas was not going to run that night due to ice on the tracks, so we went to a hotel across from the railroad station and drank coffee and hot chocolate in the hotel restaurant and tried to decide what to do next. I was wearing my Air Force Uniform since it was the warmest thing I had. A man walked up and said he overheard us talking and said that he owned the hotel and he would put us up for the night after he fed us if we would accept it. Of course, we said yes. A hot meal, warm bed and a clean shower would really be great. He took us to the room and we went to bed after cleaning up. It was funny that the heat in the hotel room was so high, we had to sleep with the window open. The next day, we went to the railroad station and boarded a train for Dallas where my dad met us. Of course we missed the funeral, so we decided we needed to get back to where we left the car and try to figure out what to do next.

After visiting with the family, we asked Dad to take us back to get the car. Sammye’s dad was a car dealer and he gave me a bottle of a product called “Liquid Glass”. He said to just pour it in the radiator and fill it with water and that would get us back to Mississippi. It did and it worked for a couple more years. When we returned home, we found out we had no water and the house had been flooded. It turned out that after we left, there was a freeze and our water pipes in the ceiling had frozen and when they thawed they began to flood the house. Our neighbors had seen and heard the water and turned it off at the meter. We had a little water damage, but everything was wet and we had to run our air conditioners for two days to dry out the house.

We lived there in Mississippi City until July 1962 and I was given orders to go to Iraklion Crete Greece. The family could not go with me until I had arranged for a house for them. They moved to Fort Worth and we rented a house from my Uncle Bill Robbins until I could get them to Greece with me.

One day in August, My family took me to the Santa Fe Railroad Station in Fort Worth to go to New York to catch a plane to Greece and my new assignment. It was a direct trip by train to Chicago. I remember we got into Chicago about 4PM the next day and I decided to see what I could about Chicago. It was my first trip to the big city and I was a little nervous to see all those people.

I left the station and went for a walk. I saw the Chicago River and some very large buildings. I went into one just to look around. As I went into the revolving door, I was pushed out the other side in the afternoon rush. I decided I had had enough of the big city and I went back to the station and waited in the USO with other military men. I felt safer there.

The train left Chicago for New Jersey that evening and settled in for an overnight ride to another big city., Jersey City New Jersey. I left the railroad station and went to see if this town was as bad as Chicago. It didn’t seen to be as bad. It was about noon, so I decided to get something to eat. There was a small café on the street and I went in. Inside, I decided that I didn’t know anything about “Yankee” food, but surely I couldn’t go wrong with a hamburger and a glass of tea. I was wrong. All my life I had eaten hamburgers made with lettuce, tomato, pickles and onion on a bun with mustard. I was served a bun and a patty. I asked where the rest was and I got stared at. I finally made the waitress understand that I had never seen such a bare burger. She gave me some mayonnaise and a piece of pickle. Then came the tea. A cup of hot water and a tea bag. That was hardly the glass of iced tea with sugar I grew up with. I said, “Do I have make it myself?” Then she put the tea bag in the cup for me with a snarl. I figured it out and asked for a glass of ice. The waitress said, “Why didn’t you ask for iced tea?” I was getting an education with every mile I traveled.

A little later, I found my way to the bus station to take me to Maguire Air Force and continue on to Greece. After a long flight over the Atlantic, I landed at Rhine Main Air Base near Frankfort Germany. I had to check in at the transient quarters because I was not going to Greece until the next day. As I was having a meal in the Base Mess Hall, I looked at the next table to see an old friend having his supper there. It was Earl Lovett from Keesler AFB.

Earl told me he was a crew chief on a transport aircraft that made flights into and out of Berlin. He was getting refugees out of West Berlin. It was the only way anything was able to get in or out of Berlin, since Berlin was behind the border of East Germany. He told me some exciting stories, which I couldn’t tell because they were top secret.

The next day I caught an Olympic Airlines plane to Athens and then on to Iraklion Crete. I was assigned to a barracks near the headquarters. My room mate was Roger Stahl. Roger was married to a Texan, so we had a lot in common. Since Roger had been at the Iraklion Air Station longer than me, I trusted him to show me around. I don’t remember hanging out with anyone else.

The next day I was sworn to secrecy and taken to a top secret compound. The photo lab was in the compound for awhile. Before I left we had moved twice. I met my boss, Ed Stewart, a pretty good photographer. Very little of our work was top secret, but since our lab was in the top secret compound, we had to always be cautious. I think most of our work was of a PR nature and a lot of it off base. Ed didn’t like leaving the base much, so I got most of the PR jobs. That’s where I got to know the Arch Bishop of Crete and the Greek Air Force commander. I also got to know Prince Peter of Greece and American Ambassador Henry Labouisse. Ambassador Labouisse was the son-in-law of Madam Curie. Ambassador Labouisse asked me if I would like to work for him at the Embassy in Athens and I said yes. I later reneged and I will explain why later. In this story.



The Ambassador was a very friendly man, as well as his wife, Madam Curie’s daughter.

Before my family moved to Crete, I got very familiar with the town and the people in it. One of my friends was Costas Papadopolous, an antique dealer. He sold antiquities, fake as well as real. It was illegal to sell the real ones, but he managed anyway. One of his clients was Anthony Quinn while Quinn was shooting the movie “Zorba The Greek“.



I was so friendly with the locals, they asked me if I would work for the Greek Secret Police. The reason they wanted me to work for the Secret Police was so I could be a cover for their illegal activities but I didn’t know that at the time. So I said yes. This got me into the National Museum where I was able to photograph many rare pieces. I also got to know the Commanding General of the Greek Air Force, who asked me to help them do a movie. Although I had very little experience with professional movie cameras, I agreed to help them. I thought it would be fun if I could pull it off. I did and I was then well respected by many Greek officials. Many years later I visited Crete and I got word that the Greek commander found out I was in town and sent his staff car for me to visit him, which we did along with our personal interpreter.

I gave up my undercover work when I had a “scrape” with an element of the Greek underworld. One night, as I was driving through Iraklion, I saw my friend Costas, motioning me over to the curb. When I stopped, Costas jumped in and in a very nervous voice began to tell me where to go. At this point, I noticed a large black Mercedes chasing us. Costas tried to explain that they were mad at him and I needed to help him get away from them. He led me down a very narrow street and the Mercedes followed me. The street was so narrow my old Chevy began to scrape the sides of the buildings, but I made it through. The Mercedes was so wide they got stuck and we got away. At that time, I decided I was through with Greek undercover work and I resigned from the Greek Secret Police. Costas left the country for awhile and I didn’t see him again for a few months.

A funny story happened to me before my family got to Crete. My wife always hated my mustache, so since I was separated from her for a couple of months, I grew a big mustache. I was introduced to a Greek photographer and was taken to his studio one night. He was very friendly and showed me around. I noticed he even slept at his studio. About a week later, my family was due, so I shaved my mustache. I did not know that in Greece, if you have a mustache and suddenly shave it off, you are considered a homosexual. I then found out that that photographer was a homosexual and I was seen at his place one night, then the next day, I shaved off my mustache. Costas and most of my Greek friends knew I was normal, but they had to explain my shave to some of their other friends. I never made that mistake again.

Chapter 21

Living in Greece



I was assigned to the Base Photo Lab at Iraklion Air Force Base, which on the north coast of Crete, about 10 miles out of the town of Iraklion. Since my family was not there yet, I had to live in the barracks for about a month. I thought it would be about a month, but it turned out to be a lot longer because I hadn’t been there very long when the Cuban Missile Crises started. The Russians were taking missiles into Cuba and president John F. Kennedy said they had to get them out or else. Things were pretty scary for awhile. We had to walk around wearing steel helmets. Ships would cruise just offshore near the base and no civilians were being allowed to travel to a military base. So my family could not leave Texas until things had settled down.

Soon after the crises was over, the new family men were taken to town to look at houses for rent. We were only allowed to rent certain places. I decided on a nice little two bedroom house not far from the Palace of Knossos in the neighborhood known as Verykokess, which means place of the apricot trees.

The house had a flat roof and beautiful varnished shutters. I told the translater how much I liked the shutters, but he must not have understood, because when I went back to the house to move in. those beautiful shutters had been painted bright blue, green, yellow and red. They were really loud. Since my furniture had not yet arrived, I borrowed furniture and appliances from the Air Force. Anyway, I got our new home ready for my family.

A few weeks went by and I got word that my family was heading my way. The day they were to arrive, The flight was delayed and they missed the flight from Athens to Crete. Things were still tense due to the Cuban missile Crisis, so no one was allowed to leave Crete. I would have gone to Athens to meet them if I could. I told a Greek friend about my delima, and he called his brother in Athens and had him meet my family there and explain why I could not meet them there.

The next night, I went to the Iraklion Crete Airport and met my family and took them to our new home.

My family thought I knew Greek because I could speak a few words, but I could not speak much of this difficult language. My kids soon learned to speak Greek so well that I often used them for my interpreter. Our landlady and my wife helped each other learn Greek and English.

So now my family is with me and we started to have our adventures. Although I quit working for the Secret Police, I was still interested in Greek antiques. Before The family got there, I had already found some places I could hunt for antiquities. My family didn’t know anything about the law and I never told them. I did tell them not to mention my collection, because some people might steal them from us, so they kept quiet.

I remember one day when I was off work and I decided to get the whole family involved. I loaded a backpack with small digging tooks and we caught a city bus. When we got off in the middle of “nowhere”, my family were puzzeded and as soon as the bus was gone and I was sure no one was around, I led them to a fence with a gap in it and told them to crawl under the fence. We came up into some old ruins dating to about 1500 BCE. Then we began to look for anything old we could carry out.

 

This is Sammye after she found some pieces of pottery.

We made a lot of friends there and they all loved our kids. Robert and Lynn spoke Greek well enough for me to use them to interpret for me.



A couple of our friends were Astro and Rena Kuti shown here on a beach in Crete



This was Lynn’s third birthday party



This was the Fourth of July Picnic at Iraklion AFS Crete.

Lynn became very popular with people of all sorts. I was often going to the Greek villages and photographing the people and often the Arch Bishop of Crete would be there. He liked me and always wanted me to sit on the throne beside him. This was hard to do since I had to photograph everything that went on there. Often we were fed at these banquets and the prized food was often lamb. I have always hated lamb and I told the Arch Bishop I could not eat lamb, so whenever he was there he would order his servants to give me beef. I was very happy to eat good beef while everyone else ate lamb.



Arch Bishop Eugenius, the Women’s Club president and me

The arch bishop loved my daughter Lynn. Below is a shot of him with my family. He was impressed that she could speak to him in Greek, but what really made him laugh was the first time she saw him in Greek she asked him if he thought he was Jesus. We guessed she said that because we took her to Sunday school on the base, and those pictures she colored always showed Jesus with a long beard. She’d never seen a live person with such a beard.



Sammye, Robert, Lynn and the Arch Bishop Of Crete

We traveled all over the island had a lot of fun. One of our favorite things to do was to camp out on the beach and swim a lot. On our last campout, Lynn got sick. It later turned into bronchitis and we took her to the hospital. There she was given a drug that later turned out to kill her. She was flown to the American hospital in Athens, where she died.Below is Sammye’s account of what happened.

Mr. Labouisse still asked Bob if he wanted to transfer to the embassy and do photography for them, it would have many advantages for us. Bob accepted that offer, but never got to go.

Why? Because about that time our three-and a-half year old daughter, Valerie Lynn, became ill after a week-end camping trip. That week-end would be her last. The weather was fine, and we decided to take our tent and camp out on our favorite beach, not too far away.

We headed for Chersonisos. We drove past the threshing floors, banana trees to the road that would take me to what we Americans called "Pebble Beach.", that lovely beach with its old Byzantine church ruins on the knoll at the east end.

Our friends, Roger and (Maria) Cookie Stahl went with us. I have never figured out why, but Lynn got sick by the time we got home, our darling baby daughter developed asthma and one afternoon she was having difficulty breathing, so I decided like any other good Mommy to take her to the doctor fearing it would get worse when she tried to go to sleep that night.

Well, soon after the doctors gave Lynn the medication she immediately began to act strange, being unfamiliar with drug reactions I just felt she was ill and that that was the reason for her odd behavior. On the way home she insisted that she stick her feet out the window of our car. Now I know she was probably experiencing a burning sensation and didn’t know how to express it to us. I felt it odd, but was unaware of the serious implications of that odd behavior. I decided that since she loved going to church and the church had installed a new bell, we could stop off there and let her ring the bell. When we got out of the car and started up the walkway she began to stiffen up her body and refusing to go in, so I gave in and put her back into the car.

All evening I could see Lynn was "not herself", but unfortunately I did not understand what was happening until it was much too late to save her. That night after going to bed and falling asleep I heard the door latch snap shut.

I called out "Bob?"

"Robert?"

Instantly I knew! Lynn she had just left the house!

When I caught up with her she was at the corner, and clearly out of her head. We put her in the car and while driving there she began to grind her teeth. To prevent her from breaking them I put my thumb in her mouth and for weeks after her death I had a blood blister on my thumb.

All evening I could see Lynn was "not herself", but unfortunately I did not understand what was happening until it was much too late to save her. That night after going to bed and falling asleep I heard the door latch snap shut.

When we got to the hospital the young doctor laughed saying he’d never seen anyone with such a reaction. She was running in circles and could not speak English or Greek. It was a mixture of them both. They said all her vital signs were good, but within hours she’d become emaciated and you could stick your fist into her rib cage. When she could speak English she would say over and over for me to comb her hair. I did…

About the second day, she sat up in bed and acted as if listening to something, then she said, "Ok, Jesus. I’ll see you tomorrow."

At that moment in time I was convinced she would not survive this, and I prayed that no matter what happened that I would accept it.

A little later, I was in the hall way and saw the entire staff of the small hospital run into her room--I thought I would die for a few minutes until they came back out. They told Bob and I that one of us needed to accompany her to Athens to a larger hospital. Bob said he would go, I pushed him aside and said, "No. No, Darling, I am going."

They called in a special air vac plane with a nurse aboard, and just before she was loaded aboard she looked at her Daddy and seemed normal and gave him a beautiful smile…that was the last time he ever saw her.

Aboard the place the nurse took her temperature and said it was 107 degrees. I disputed that stating, "she’s so cold."

"No, it is correct." was the reply. Our poor baby. Maybe they could save her in Athens.

But in the Athens hospital the reply was the same," We don’t know what is wrong, all her vital signs are good," the doctors said. A few hours later, I was sitting in the room with her and she simply stopped breathing. I ran out calling frantically for help. They came with oxygen (which the equipment would not work), then the doctor said, "Leave the room."

"No, this is my child I won’t go!"

"Do you want to see me do a tracheotomy ?" was the doctor’s reply.

I left. Sitting in that large waiting room I could see we were up several stories and

my thinking revealed how un-rational I was because I remember thinking that if Lynn died I was going to jump to my death.

I don’t really know how long I was sitting there, but when the young doctor came toward me he didn’t really have to say a word. But he said, "Mrs. Lamb, I don’t know why, but your daughter died. I’m so…sorry," he was crying.

Since I was alone in a strange town and knew no one I was given a room in the hospital for the night. In my grief I cried out all the questions a grieving mother would have aloud until they came with a swirling glass filled with a gray liquid.

"I don’t want that. I want to call my husband. "

I called Crete, and due to the lateness of the hour, they would not go disturb Bob and I was unable to tell Bob personally our little darling, sweet precious Lynn had died. I really don’t remember who I told, I think the Sergeant at Arms but I had to tell them three times Lynn had died. I just could not say it a forth time.

Then next morning Bob came, they had asked me if they could do an autopsy as it might "help another family" if they knew the reason Lynn had died; I agreed. Since there was no military undertaker in Greece one had to be flown in from Turkey so Bob was not able to see Lynn after she died. I don’t know if that was a blessing or not…

I don’t know how many days Bob and I were in Athens away from our little son, Robert, who was just four and a-half, but we had to go buy a casket something a parent never thinks he will ever have to buy for their child.

I had no clothes of Lynn’s with me, so we decided to bury her in a new pair of pajamas. Later, I learned that the Bible teaches that the dead are sleeping . Sleeping in death. When I learned this I was glad we’d bought pajamas instead of a new dress to bury her in, it was more appropriate than I‘d known.

We went back to the island of Crete and learned they had shipped out the doctor who’d given Lynn the medicine. That was unnecessary, we’d never have blamed him. We were shocked when we got the death certificate and it said Lynn had died of bronchitis. I will NEVER believe that. Years later, I came to believe Lynn died from Rhyes Syndrome.

That is an illness that follows pneumonia and when a young child is given an aspirin it can cause a life threatening situation. At that time the disease was completely unheard of. In fact, all good Mommies gave their babies the pink baby aspirin, in those days. Today no mother in her right mind would never give a young child aspirin, right?

We had the Arch bishop of Crete conduct a memorial service for Lynn. No, we weren’t Greek Orthodox. But once when Bob was photographing an orphanage there were festivities, and Bob brought us all along. While there, Lynn enchanted the arch bishop. He saw this pretty little blonde girl and came up to speak to her. She saw the robes he was wearing and his beard, and in perfect (three year cold’s) Greek looked him in the eye and said, "Do you think you are Jesus?"

No one ever spoke to him that way and he almost fell over with laughter. He had to sit with us and hold her during the events of that day.

Later, his car would sometimes pass our house and he’d make sure he would blow the horn and wave if Lynn was in the yard after that first meeting.

I threw some clothes for Bob and Robert into a suitcase, but never thought of anything for myself. And we retuned to the United States where Bob was assigned to Perrin Air Force Base in Sherman Texas, where we burried Lynn in the Lamb plot.

OK, This is Bob again. I will try to write my memories for that terrible time. I remember that I left Sammye at the base hospital with Lynn. I took Robert to stay with the Stahl family while I waited to see what would happen. I then decided to drive back to the base. About halfway there, I saw an ambulance coming and I stopped. The ambulance stopped too. It was taking Sammye and Lynn to the airport to take them to a large hospital in Athens. When I saw who was in the ambulance, I thought I would faint right there on the road. They said they had to get her to a larger facility as soon as possible. Here’s where the story gets hard again. Lynn looked at me and waved and that was the last time I ever saw her.

I thought I would go to the base and wait for news. I knew they had better communications that I could get anywhere else and Robert was safe with our friends. Someone found me a bed near the Air Police office and I decided to see if I could get some sleep. Finally I went to sleep and sometime around midnight I awakened by a chaplain and some of my friends. When I saw them, I knew what had happened and I completely broke down. I don’t remember much after that except that I think they took me to the base hospital and gave me a shot or something to knock me out until morning. They then took me to the Iraklion airport where an Air Force plane was waiting for me. I remember flying to Athens with my boss. I guess he was the one who was taking care of me.

In Athens I was taken to the hospital where Sammye was waiting for me. I had to take care of some paperwork and pay for Lynn’s hospital stay. The man said he hated to charge me, but he had to. He also said that since she lived past midnight I had to pay for two days. The money was not a big thing, I think it was about $2. Then I had to get a casket from the Base Exchange. I think some charitable fund paid for that.

Then some organization that takes care of emergencies like that took Sammye and I to a hotel. The next day we walked around Athens and visited a WW II cemetery there. We saw a tombstone that we liked and decided to get one like it for Lynn. It said, “One less angel on Earth, one more angel in Heaven”. We then walked back to the hotel and waited for instructions.

A little later we got a call and someone said we should get ready to leave Athens. Then someone picked us up and took us to the airport where an old Air Force plane was waiting to take us to Crete to make arrangements to go to Texas and our families. We left Athens about dark and headed out over the Mediterranean. About 30 minutes later, The co pilot came back to where we were sitting and told us we had to return to Athens because the plane was burning too much fuel and we didn’t have enough fuel to get to Crete. So, we went back to Athens and someone met us and took us back to the hotel.

The next day we were picked up and taken to the airport where we boarded another plane and went back to Crete, where we were picked up and taken home. Somehow Robert was brought back home and now our little family was back together.

All our friends knew what had happened and arrangements were made for the Arch Bishop of Crete and our Air Force Chaplain would have a memorial service for Lynn. The Ach Bishop would conduct a service in Greek for our friends and the Chaplain would give a service in English. Both services were held at the Base Chapel and many Greek officials and our Greek friends attended.

Some people told us not to worry about anything and our belongings would be taken care of until we either came back to Greece or they would ship our belongings to us. We then started off on a wild trip back to the USA. Because of the type work I did, I was not allowed to fly over many countries and so we basically hitchhiked all over Europe and to the USA. We were taking any American aircraft we could that was not going to fly over certain countries. I think we found a plane going from Greece to Italy, then another one to France, then another one to Germany, where we found one going to Scotland. In Scotland, we found a flight going to the USA and we took it to New Jersey. At this point, we took an American Airlines plane to Dallas., where we were met by family.

Next we had to make arrangements for Lynn’s funeral. Sammye’s preacher in Fort Worth decided he could not do it, so we then asked my Grandmothers preacher in Sherman Texas.

So, Lynn’s body was then flown to Sherman Texas for her funeral. This was the first time I found out that I would not be able to see her. They told us that federal law said that any body sent to the USA from overseas had to be in a steel, welded shut coffin and it could not be opened. My cousin Missy, took care of covering the steel box with a nice cover for the funeral.

After the funeral, we went to Fort Worth and stated writing letters to see if I could get stationed in Sherman Texas near where Lynn was buried. In a few days we got orders to report to Perrin AFB in Sherman Texas .

Soon after we settled in in Sherman Texas, I went to work at the Base photo lab. I had only worked there a few hours when I got a call from my sister‘s father-in-law in Tyler Texas. He told me that my father was found dead in his car. Two weeks after we buried our lovely daughter, I was now faced with another funeral. That of my own father.

The Lamb family was all called together and we discussed what happened and what to do next. My dad’s brothers all thought there were too many unanswered questions as to what happened. The decided that we should do our own investigation. They knew that I had done some work for OSI and the Greek Secret police, so they wanted me to find the truth. Three Lamb brothers and I drove to Tyler Texas to talk to the police. They told us that they found Dad in his car beside a small lake on the northeast side of Tyler. They said he had been dead about three days. That would have been September 23 or 24. They told us where the lake was and we went there to look around.

We found where the car was and after checking all around, I found some receipts that Dad had. I knew Dad would not hve thrown them away. He always kept receipts of everything he bought, even gas receipts, which I found on the ground. I also found a receipt for some archery equipment and a motel receipt dated September 25, which was after he was claimed to be dead. We went to the motel and interviewed the workers there and they remembered him. He had told them he was going to Fort Worth for his son’s birthday and he was taking my brother some archery equipment. None was found in the car when the police turned the car over to us.

Another suspicious thing was the lake where he was found was on the northeast side of Tyler and to get there he would have to pass my sisters house on the south side of Tyler. Dad lived in Beaumont Texas which was south of Tyler. I was pretty sure Dad got into town too late to see Paula, so he checked into the motel., but he never made it to Paula’s house, so something was wrong for him to wind up on that lake.

By talking to people all around that lake, I found out that about the time Dad was found there, the police caught three excaped prisoners. My theory was that Dad had picked them up hitchhiking and they decided to rob him. He got scared and had a heart attack. The police didn’t say anything about the prisoners, so I assumed they were embarrassed about the jailbreak and didn’t want that information out. At least we had a better date for his death certificate. We just let it drop, the truth would not bring Dad back, so we went back to Sherman to have the funeral.

Dad was buried in the Shannon Cemetary next to Lynn. In 1935 Mom had a little girl that died very young. Dad bout 13 cemetery lots in the Shannon Cemetary north of Sherman. My sister Wanda June was the first to be buried there, then my grandfather, Robert Newton Lamb was next. Then Lynn and two weeks later, Daddy was buried there.

After the funeral, my uncle Glen took Dad’s car and drove back to his home in California. We all tried to get back to a normal life after all that sadness.

Chapter 22

Our life in Sherman Texas

We rented a small furnished house in the middle of Sherman, not far from where I lived when I was first born. After a month or so, we got word that our belongings had arrived from Greece, so we rented a large old house on North Elm, about a block from Highway 75. While living there in November, I will never forget, I had just parked my car behind the house and I was listening to the radio, when an announcement came over the air that JFK had just been shot and shortly afterward, he was pronounced dead. That was just about 75 miles away in Dallas. I had always liked him and now another death in my life. That was a very bad year, 1963.

Christmas of 63 was also bad. Two of my family was gone and I really missed them. We did the best we could and got through it. In January 64, a little girl began calling on my wife with the Watchtower and Awake magazines. My wife thought that was cute, but she never seriously considered studying them or changing religions. We had joined the Baptist church my grandmother went to and Sammye joined the choir.

After accepting the magazines for a few months, the little girl turned Sammye over to an older lady and she placed a book and brochure with Sammye. One day, the lady called on Sammye and asked her about the book and brochure. Sammye brought them out and opened up the brochure. She then glanced down at the page where she opened it and saw a statement that said something like, “WHEN YOU ARE DEAD, YOU ARE JUST DEAD”. She was shocked. We just “Knew” that our loved ones are in Heaven and looking down on us. The lady reasoned with Sammye from the Bible, but Sammye would have none of that! When the lady left, Sammye asked her to come back the next day. She said she had to help that woman. Sammye spent the next few hours trying to prove the woman wrong. The research proved to Sammye that we were wrong, not the woman.

Sammye tried to convince me, but I thought I knew better and would have nothing to do with it. Sammye left the Baptist church and became one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. So did I, (9 YEARS LATER).

Robert, Sammye and I still felt horrible about Lynn and Daddy dieing. We even contemplated suiside, but needless to say, that didn’t work out. A reporter found out about our story and decided to write a story about it. She asked me for a family picture and I set it up at home with all three of us and a picture of Lynn along with some things we had brought from Greece.



The Lamb family for a newspaper article about us

My assignment at Perrin was fairly stress free. I had no dead people to photograph and no Top Secret work to do. I did mostly PR work for the Air Force. I also did portraits and newspaper work. I did a little work for OSI, but it was not very stressful. There was one photo studio in Sherman and I got to know the owner, Vick Quin. Mr. Quin hired me to shoot some weddings.

We decided that since we were now at home, we might as well buy a house in Sherman. My cousin’s brother-in-law was a real estate agent, so we talked to him. He was selling new houses in a new subdivision north of Sherman. We qualified for a loan. All we needed was a down payment. When we first got married, we bought a lot on lake Texoma, so he took that lot for the down payment.

The new house we picked was on Duke Drive. We picked a three bedroom, bath and half with a garage and patio. The color we picked was barn red trimmed in white. We moved into the new house settled in.



A few months after moving in Sammye and Robert were going to all the meetings at the Kingdom hall and Sammye had left the Baptist church. Sammye had begun to go out preaching and was gone a lot. I being the sneaky guy I am thought that if I could get her to get a job, she would give up on her preaching work. She needed a car for her preaching work, so I bought her a 51 Ford convertable. The plan was to have her go to work to pay for the car. She said OK and got a job. The job she got was cleaning a medical facility at night. It didn’t stop her from preaching, so my plan did not work.

I had just about decided to leave the Air Force. Vick Quin offered to sell me his studio and an old photographer friend from Mississippi wanted to be my partner, so he brought a trailer full of photo equipment and we started making plans. I was offered an assignment to go to color photo school in Denver a a couple of months. I thought that since I was considering opening my own studio, the training would be helpful, so I agreed to it. Mr. Quin backed out of the sale, so once again I was undecided as to what to do.

Anyway. I decided to go get the color training anyway and I drove to Denver for that school. Since the school was only a few hours per day, I had plenty of time for fun things, like camping and skiing in the mountains. My teacher and I had a lot in common, so we spent a good bit of time in jazz clubs, listening to jazz, talking about music and photography and drinking beer. It was a very nice trip. I called Sammye almost every night and she always tried to convince me I should study the Bible with “Donald”. I finally agreed thinking she was talking about my uncle Donald. She wasn’t, she was talking about her Witness friend, Donald Tubbs. Anyway, I was commited.

There was a reporter at the base that saw a picture I had made of Robert and she thought that would make a good story for the Air Force Times. I agreed and gave her the picture, which was run world wide and seen by a lot of our Air Force friends around the world.



So, I had decided to give up the Air Force and start my own business. Then came another life changing offer. I was offered a three year assignment in Germany. Since I was not going to get the studio in Sherman, I decided to take the German offer. Since my enlistment was about up, I had to sign an agreement to spend another four years in the Air Force. I did and then I applied for concurrent travel for my family, which means that we would all travel to Germany together. That application put a hold on the assignmrent. No problem, it would be just a little longer before we could get to Germany.

Then came to “other shoe”. Since I had my assignment on hold, I got another assignment, this time to Viet Nam. Now, this was not good. No families and also a lot of danger. I tried a trick that worked. I called the people who had turned in my request for concurrent travel for my family and told him. Forget about the concurrent travel, just get me to Germany as soon as possible. I would take care of the family going after I got there. Orders for Germany were cut and I left as soon as possible. I was in Germany before they could cut me orders for Viet Nam.

Before I knew my trick would work, I told my uncle who was on his way to Viet Nam that I would see him there. Later, he told me he looked all over Viet Nam for me and I wan’t there. I checked out of Perrin as soon as I could and took my car to New Orleans to be shipped to Germany. I also put our house up for rent and had our belongings shipped to Germany.

Chapter 23

Our life in Germany

I arrived in Germany in the Summer of 1965. I checked into My assignment and was given a large room in an old German Army barracks. I was not there long before my car came into Bremerhaven Germany, so I was not without a car very long. I set out to find an apartment as soon as possible. I found one not far from the American school where Robert would go. I don’t know where our belongings were stored, but I applied to get them delivered to me.



So, we lived in a three story house on the top floor in Wiesbaden Germany. Sammye and Robert arrived in Early September and we all settled in to our little apartment. I bought a small TV and we had a phone. Germany is cold in September, but the locals don’t think so and they don’t turn on the heat until October. Sammye was cold for long time. I told her I would turn up the heat on the radiator. She saw me turn it up, but she didn’t know we would not have any heat for almost a month. She thought she was warmer, but in a week or so, I think she figured it out and then she got REAL cold.

Robert started to school right away and he caught the bus near the house. Sammye was determined to find the Kingdom Hall, so she set out to find it. She got an address and found out what bus to take. That night she got a ride home in a car and it turned out to be with the wife of a man I worked with, so she was making friends fast.

When my belongings were found, I needed to find another apartment because the apartment we were living in was furnished. I found a place in the Taunus Mountains in the town of Hawn. It was a three story house with two more American families living there. We lived on the top floor and had a good view of the mountains.



We also had shopping nearby and we had beer deliveries and we bought milk from the local dairy. Robert could go to the dairy and get our milk and next door was a place to buy beer and wine, so Robert took care those chores for us.

We only had one car, so Sammye and Robert had to take the train to go to meetings or hospital or dentists. Just about anything we needed was easy to get to. We alo bought bicycles and rode them all over the mountains. Sometimes, we would ride our bikes up into the mountains. Robert rode on the back of Sammyes bike and I strapped our photo equipment and picknik supplies on the back of my bike. We would ride around and look for a good picnic location as well as a good location for portraits.

Onc ewe found a hay stack that had a hollowed out place where some deer had been spending the cold nights. It looked like a great place for a picnic as well as good location for portraits. The shots below or on the next page were shot with a 4X5 Speed Graphic on sheet film. That’s a lot of equipment to pack onto the back of a bicycle, but we did it.

 

Sammye in the deer bed and Sammye in the picnic spot

We really enjoyed living there and Germany was basically in the middle of Europe and we could drive all over Europe from our home in Germany. Remember that in the Air Force, we had 30 days off every year and when there was a holiday that fell near a weekend, we could get a lot of time off. In three or four hours you could drive to four of five different countries.

The autobahn in Germany and the Autostrata in Italy had few speed limits, so you can usually drive as fast as you want. It’s the only place I the world I have driven over 120 miles an hour and legally.

The work I did in Germany was all classified Secret, Top Secret or above Top Secret. The name of my security clearance was classified, so I could not even say what my clearance was. For awhile, I worked in a large building with large secure doors that could only be opened by pushing the right buttons. When we had visitors, they had to be blindfolded and we had to carry guns to make sure the did not take off their blindfolds until they were in an enclosed room with no windows. I often wore a shoulder holster with a 38. I sometimes had a rifle. Since a lot of our work was in the total darkness, it got a little dangerous at times. One the men that worked for me thought he would take his gun off while he was in the dark alone. He accidentally hit the table and shot the gun. The bullet bounced all around the room and fell in the sink beside him. That was the last time he took his gun off in the dark.

In my last year there, I had my department move out of the large secure building and into an underground bunker with only one exterior door and it was about a foot thick. My three men and I were the only ones who knew the combination, so Our boss had to ask permission to enter and we had to open the door for him. That made it easy for us to do just about anything we wanted to and nobody but us knew what we were doing. We played a lot of cards. That was a pretty cool assignment. Since I was the only artiscally trained photographer, I decorated the walls of the compund with my photographs of Europe, like the Eiful Tower at nigh and some old castles and churches. It felt good to be the “artist” in that organization.

The place I worked was in an old German Army Camp from WWII. It was on the Rhine River and that’s where we ate most of the time. It was either that or get a ride to the Air Base a few miles away and eat at the mess hall. I think everyone I knew at down on the river or in local restraints. The most popular place was a bratworst and beer stand on the river. I never knew the name of the old lady that owned it, but we all called her “Apple Annie”. If it was not too cold, we all ate out under the trees on the river and it was always, bratwurst and brochen with beer to drink. If it was too cold we went into some of the local restaurants for a fine meal.

It was sometimes strange to think that thse German soldiers and sailors were our mortal enemies just 20 years earlier and my uncle had been an American soldier and had probably killed some of their relatives..