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 Life was easy then. We lived in Sacramento California. It was the early 60's and the Viet Nam war had just started. Let's not forget the Cuban missile crisis also. I guess that was a little scary. The only time that I felt a real sense of something wrong in or country at that young age, was when president Kennedy was shot. I was in school and the teacher came into the classroom crying and told us school was closing and for all of us to go home. It was only later that I came to learn the CIA's and KGB's involvement in his assasination.
At the age of 9 after throwing fits and pleading with my mother, I was finally allowed to go live with my dad. I stayed at my grandparents for a couple of weeks before my dad and his new wife were able to come down from North Dakota to get me. I didn't have much clothes or other belongings so we packed up and moved back to Crosby, Norther Dakota. To this day I have fond memories of that little town. It is very close to the US-Canada boder. It was also very cold! I remember my first winter there and trying to ride my bike to school on the ice and snow. Now that was a funny sight.
We stayed there for about a year with only my dad, his wife and myself. I was in the fourth grade then and had a teacher named Ida Romsis. I was behind in learning (California schools are not very good), and a slow reader. She would spend a lot of time with me to get me up to the level of the other kids. Due to this I was always called the teacher's pet. Ida was old even then, probably around 65 or 70, and was the best teacher I ever had bar none. She was more like a second mom than a teacher. She took a real liking to me and I would visit her at her home often. She was a teacher that really cared about her students and it showed. Too bad she is not with us anymore.
I also had a very good friend there named Paul. I have wondered many times if he is still there. We were very close and did everything together. Even get into trouble. I remember once when I was riding a horse that belonged to a friend of my dad. I didn't have much experience at that time with horses. Paul and I went off riding together through the fields. Up there is mostly farm lands so we had a lot of fields to ride through. We got the idea to have a race between him and I. Paul had been raised around horses and I was just starting. I should have known better but when you are 9 you don't think of those things. Well we took off and I was never so scared in my life! When you are 9 years old and on top of a big animal like that and not expecting the power he has, well I think you could probably guess what happened. My inexperience caused me to lose my grip and I fell off the horse. He on the other hand just kept going. Paul stopped for a second to make sure I was alright then took off after my horse. He was never able to catch up with him and gave up.
I went home horseless and waited for dad to get home. I thought everything was ok. Like it was an everyday thing that a horse gets loose. Like a pet bird that got loose and flew away. Boy was I in for a suprise! The owner of the horse with the help of some farm neighbors found the horse out in one of the wheat fields eating away. They said I was lucky the horse didn't get bloated from eating all that wheat. I was never allowed to ride that horse again. Paul and I still managed to have a lot of fun together though. For such a small town we had a lot of fun. This all came to an end all too soon.
I was enjoying being an only child. My dad spent time with me and got me my first bb gun and started teaching me how to shoot. We lived in a basement there and he would set up targets for me to shoot at. I was in the Weblos (a branch between cub scouts and boy scouts) and dad got me all the gear I needed for that. Paul and I were both in the same den. It was around this time that my dad got a call from my mother asking him to come and get my sisters for them to live with us. I thought: great this is all I need! Two girls to get in my way in all this fun I was having.
So we packed up and moved back out to California. We picked up my sisters and moved into a little appartment in Inglewood where my sisters and I had to share a bedroom. My dad put up a divider between us so there was a little semblance of privacy. I hated that apartment and I missed my firends in North Dakota especially Paul. This was the same time that the zodiac killer was running loose. We were not there long when the news reported that he had killed a woman not more than a block away from where we lived!
My Dad and his wife (Marietta) both worked for some electronics company called SDC. My dad was in electronics in the Air Force so I guess this suited him fine. Calofornia is not a place to raise small kids though so after about a year there, we packed up again and moved back to North Dakota. We got to see a lot of things on our way up there. We got to see Old Faithful in the Yellowstone Park, the redwood forest, the Grand Canyon, the Four Corners and Mount Rushmore. I am glad my dad did that for us then because I have never had the chance to revisit those things since then.
We didn't move back to Crosby. I was really upset. I will always have my fondest childhood memories of living in Crosby and my friend Paul. We moved to Jamestown which is about halfway between Bismark and Fargo. We stayed there for about a year then my dad bought this huge house in a little town named Windsor. It was about 3 miles from where Marietta's mother lived in Cleveland. Windsor had a 2 room school house with an old bell in front that the teachers used to signal recess and lunch. Yes there really was little old schools like that. One room had kindergarten through 3rd grades and my room had 4th through 8th grades. With the exception of a year that I moved back out with my mother (I will talk about that later) I grew up there in that little town of Windsor in North Dakota. I never really liked it much but it still beat the city life in California. It is there that I started forming my own opinions about life and politics. |
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