It's my birthday, and I'm taking a night off!

Yes, hard as it is to believe, this kid was born 74 years ago in Fukuoka, Japan, to a Second Lieutenant in the Infantry, and a former Red Cross girl.  They had met at Immaculata High School in Leavenworth, Kansas, a few years before, when dad was a senior and a first-string fullback on the football team, and mom was a starry-eyed freshman watching him play from the stands.

They ran into each other again in 1946 in the Philippines.  She was 21 and he was 25 and within a few weeks, they were married.  Almost exactly one year later, I was born in a field hospital, wrapped in an olive drab Army blanket, and driven home in a Jeep,.  I was fed C-ration condensed milk and rice and mashed up canned vegetables.  A year later, dad was flown back to the states for a new assignment, and mom was put on a troopship with a one year old boy the crew nicknamed “First Sergeant” because I screamed so loudly.  Twenty-eight days later, the ship docked in San Francisco, dad met us at the dock, and we were off to San Antonio, Texas.

And so on and so on for the next 17 years…

More to come later.

The best birthday present I could be given would be more paid subscribers to this newsletter.  So if you haven’t subscribed, give it a thought.  This is the way we do it in the new world of online independent journalism.  You’d make me a very happy birthday boy, not to mention newsletter writer!