Live Long*, Learn a Little, Laugh a Lot

Pine: A species of evergreen tree. Wood: cellular material for building things. Derby: A style of hat, also a race, as in the Kentucky Derby. Combined, Pine, Wood, Derby is a Cub Scout activity wherein boys watch their fathers race cars they (5%) and their fathers (95%) have built. Many things can be made from wood, including arguments, high blood pressure, and peptic ulcers.

"Watch this," Mr. Olson beamed. He opened the wide little wooden door of the new table top record player. He slipped in one fo the 33 1/3 rpm long playing records which were just appearing on the market. Music poured from the box, but not for long. Mr. Olson stopped the record, opened the door, and slid the record out to show us again how it worked. School had not yet taken up, and he soon had a gathering of teachers and a few students admiring the handsome mahogany box.

Our school was named after Chief Peteetneet, leader of a Native American tribe who roamed the valley before the white settlers crowded them out. The teachers didn't tell us much about the chief, or how having his name on our old school would inspire our educational efforts. He made at least one contribution. We learned to spell a very long word very early in our academic careers. It was like spelling Mississippi in which you just keep tossing in "i's" and "ss's" until it looks about right. With Peteetneet you just keep adding "e's," and an occasional "t" until it seems long enough.

I smoked my first cigarette when I was 5 years old. It wasn't easy. It was wet from the rain. It took about half a box of matches that Max Reese snitched from their kitchen to keep it going. We found the pack of cigarettes in a train coal car across the street from our house. I don't know if the nicotine from the tobacco or the sulfur from the matches was worse for my lungs.

You wouldn't believe what it takes to fight a war. Besides guns, tanks, ships, and airplanes, it takes cowboy boots, candy bars, baseball bats, fathers, ground up nuts, and handkerchiefs, lots of handkerchiefs.

The experience burned itself into my brain, and kept echoing through my youthful years, "I want to do that someday."

My brother on the front fender gripped the small sailing ship medallion on the hood that signified we were driving a Plymouth. The breeze began to blow his hair as we moved a bit faster into the darkness; black night penetrated feebly by the wavering beam of a flashlight and the receding headlights of the car in front of us.

If some is good, more is better—or not, my father taught me.

"In addition to our world-class playground, we had Saturday movies which included rustlers, fistfights, gunslingers and the ever-present danger of growing up."

"She was a woman of adventure from the big town, Salt Lake City. She visited several times a day, and she had a backyard any imaginative child would die for (and almost did as our parents sometimes warned us)."