Collectors.  My Mom and Dad were both collectors and they collected so many things it always reminded me of our home being like a museum.  Neither of them had more than an 8th grade education, but they were better educated (self educated) than most people I have met in my life.  I am sure from their life experiences and self education that both of them had the equivalent of at least a Masters in Liberal Arts and probably my father close to a BS in Geology in addition to that. 

I can remember several professional geologists that were friends of his.  As a child, I would sit and listen to their many conversations.  My father was far better educated in that field than most of them and they often came to him for advice. 

I am sure I could say the same about my mother and antiques.  She was consulted by many people about her knowledge of antiques, but as a young boy, I didn't listen to her conversations with the same enthusiasm as I did with my father and his friends, because geology and mining was a love I shared with my father.

Musicians.  My Mom was probably one of the most talented musicians I have ever known.  When we were kids going to high school and brought home an instrument (Me - Trumpet, then Drums), (Connie - Clarinet) and (Tia - I am not sure), she could always play the instrument within a few minutes.  I know for sure she could play guitar, piano, accordion, banjo, Bandello, mandolin, harp, drums, trumpet, saxophone, clarinet, French horn, drums, harmonica, and there are probably some I have missed.  She played all of these instruments by ear and she could also play sheet music if necessary.  My Dad was not really a great musician, but he loved to hear my Mom play and sing and I remember his singing to me on the way home from work many times.  He could play the harmonica and the Jews harp also.  I have tried to play both and could never play either.  I always loved to get together with my Mom and get her to play her guitar and sing for me.  She taught me to cord on the Guitar a little and she always said which ever one of us kids learned to play the guitar is the kid that she would give her guitar to.  I still have the guitar, but I don't play it very often.    

     After my Dad died, I found myself singing one verse of a song he used to sing to me over and over each morning in the shower and I couldn’t get it out of my head for about five years.  So finally I posted a note with the words I could remember on an internet newsgroup.  I got an answer the following day with a link to the lyrics.  As soon as I got all of the lyrics and sang all of the way through the song, I was able to shower in the morning in peace and not have to sing part of the song each morning.  The song is called “Was it Rain” by Francis Langford as follows:

WAS IT RAIN
By: Frances Langford

Skies were gray that rainy day
We parted in the lane;
Was it tears that fell or was it rain?
There we stood as lovers would;
Did parting bring you pain?
Was it tears that fell or was it rain?
I couldn`t tell if your eyes were misty,
Or if you felt regret,
I noticed when you kissed me
That both your cheeks were wet.
Till we meet again, my sweet,
That mem`ry will remain.
Was it tears that fell or was it rain?

Gardening.  When my Dad and Mom decided to have a garden, my Dad and I started to haul river sand into the yard across from the house.  I remember many Saturdays spent with him going to the river and shoveling by hand a pickup truck load at a time onto the truck and then going home and shoveling it off.  Many Saturdays we would do this ten or fifteen times.  We also used to stop by the river on the way home from work in the summer and get a load and take it home and shovel it off into the garden.  Dad kept track of how much we hauled home and it went to 315 before we stopped.  After the river sand, came the fertilizer and we went to the Plumas County Fairgrounds and they had a huge pile of manure and straw from the livestock shows they had there every year and over one summer, Dad and I hauled home over 100 truck loads of that and spread it over the garden.  Then each evening we would turn the manure and sand and the following year, Mom planted a garden on it.  I remember the vegetables were fantastic and especially the hills of potatoes.  The first harvest, there was one hill of potatoes that yielded over 40 pounds of potatoes and they got one potato that weighed around 5-6 pounds (I may be exaggerating a bit here, I will have to check the pictures).

Snow and Cold.  I miss the snow we had when we were kids living at Virgilia Mine.  I remember there were times when I hated it too, like when I had to shovel 4-5 feet of snow off of the 450 foot long driveway.  Depending on how deep the snow was, I can remember it taking all day if I was lucky or if it was really a heavy snow, sometimes two or three days.  I remember my back was always hurting when I was done even if it only took a day to finish shoveling it all off.  The snow shoveling memories have faded away mostly, but the fun we had sledding on the side of the hill are still strong memories.   When we got a big snow 2-3+ feet, we would go out and pack down the snow with our feet or shovels and then before we went to bed, we would take my Dad's 5 gallon spray can and go spray water on top of the packed snow.  When it froze over night, we could sled down the hill on that sheet of ice and it was really fast.  We always built a jump (big pile of snow that was smoothed over) near the bottom of the sled run for those of us that were more daring. 

            I can remember one time when there were three of us on a big inner tube (from a big truck tire) when we went down the sled run.  Tia was in the middle of the tube and I was on one side and someone else was on the other side of Tia.  When we went over the jump we got airborne and Tia's head went through the whole in the tube and when we came down, she got her nose scraped up pretty bad.  I am sure if you asked her today, she would still say she always had a good time, or at least most of the time anyway.  I am sure there were times when I got hurt as well, but that never stopped us.  Sometimes in the winter, Dad would tie a rope on the back of the truck (when it had chains on) and tow us on the sled

behind the truck. 

            There were some times when the water froze in the water pipes and we would catch rain in a rain barrel or haul snow in the house and melt it on the stove to use for flushing the toilets of for drinking water after it had been boiled to kill the germs.  This would also mean Dad and I would be our walking the water line and building fires on it (it was mostly steel pipe except where it went over the creek).  Sometimes we would have to dig through the snow and ice to get to where we could build a fire on the ground over the pipe.  Of course we had to carry dry newspaper and firewood with us along the pipeline to build fires

with.  The water pipe line went from our house up Rush Creek and across Rush Creek on an overhead cable and up Rich Gulch for nearly three quarters of a mile.  That is a lot of pipe to thaw out when it freezes.  When it freezes in one spot, the whole thing freezes as well.

Wood and Wood Stoves.  I remember going with my Dad up on the logging roads to gather firewood.  You know, we used to fill the wood shed every summer with wood and by the end of the spring, it was mostly gone.  My Dad would always help get the wood, but from the time I was six years old, chopping and carrying the firewood in for the cook stove, heater stove and fireplace was always my responsibility.  I had to do this every night after school so my Mom would have wood all day to keep the house warm, cook on, and heat the water for cleaning and bathing.  One day I measured the wood shed to see how much wood it took to fill it.  It was 12 feet wide by 12 feet high by 24 feet long (the length of the house where the recreation room / fire place / sewing room was).  That is 3456 cubic feet of wood when it was full.  A cord of wood is 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet or 128 cubic feet, so that means when the wood shed was full there was 27 cord of wood in it (3456 / 128 = 27).  That was how much wood I had to split and carry in every winter.  There were times when I was not home because I stayed in town or sometimes at your house and my Dad would do those chores for me and he never once complained like I used to when I was younger.  Sometime between the time I was 6 years old and 12 years old, I finally figured out it did no good to complain about this to my Mom.  I still had to go do it

after I complained. 

            My Dad had installed an extra water heater tank before the electric water heater and the cold water supply line ran into the back of my Mom's wood stove and through the fire box.  From the fire box it ran into the first water tank and was hot or at least pre heated before it went into the electric hot water heater.  This saved a lot of money heating the cold water for us.  The wood stove my mother cooked on was an old O'Keefe and Merritt with the warming ovens over the stove that pre-heated the plates for dinner and kept food warm after it was finished cooking but also kept it from drying out (sort of like we use the microwave for now).  There was nothing that compared to coming home from school and opening the door to the smell of Mom cooking bread.  I remember she always used to make two or three pans of buns because she knew us kids couldn't keep our hand off of the bread if she didn't.

Christmas and New Years.  When we were small, my Mom used to sit us down before Christmas and make all of us kids cut different colored paper and make paper chains and paste them together using white paste.  When our paper chains were complete, we would use them to decorate the house and Christmas Tree.  She also made popcorn and taught us to take a needle and thread and string the popcorn for decorations.  We did the same with fresh cranberries.  Many times before Christmas, she also would sew pot holders and then iron on light colored blue stencils and we would take different colored applicator pens and color them to give as Christmas presents. 

Earlier in the season, we would hike along the Power Lines and collect any copper wire that the linemen had dropped or discarded and carry it home in our backpacks.  Additionally, I would go to work with my Dad in the summer and go around the job site after work and pick up all of the copper wire scraps that the electricians left from wiring the houses.  We would take it home and burn the insulation off of it or strip it off if it was easy and put it with the rest of the copper stash we had collected.  Once a year, my Dad would get it all together and take it to the salvage yard in Oroville and sell it to them.  He would then split the money up between us kids, so we would have money for Christmas Presents.  I think sometimes, he and Mom would add a little to it before we split it up.  I know that both Mom and Dad often went without so that us kids could have things we needed.

The Rope Swings Papa Made For Us.  All of us loved to play with rope swings when we were young and my father was always there to make these types of experiences the best they could be for us.  The first rope swing he put up for us lasted about 4-5 years before we out grew it because it was not fast enough or high enough, so my father climbed up in a real tall oak tree and put a metal shackle through a “Y” in a large branch and hung a big thick rope over it and then built a platform and a shorter rope so that we would start off higher.  When you went off of the platform, and went all the way out, you were nearly 30 feet in the air.

Coming of Age.         I quit school after the 10th grade and never looked back.  In High School, I only had General Math.  When I got in the Marines, I went back to school at night and in three months, I finished my High School Diploma (not a GED).  In 1977, I finished my 4 year tour in the Marines and went back home and went to work with my father, working for Barlow Construction, doing concrete work.  After about a month working with my father, I told him, he should get his contractor's license and I would run the operation for him.  He laughed and said he was not interested.  He told me, go get your contractors license and that he would run it for me.  Well, it didn't happen that way, because Plumas County could not support the level of achievement I wanted, so may father and I never worked together on this.  Within a year I got my contractors license and was running a concrete business in Southern California and working 7 days a week, 16 hours a day.  During that 7 year period, I stayed focused on making lots of money and I managed to average 10,000,000 square feet a year on my hands and knees.  I got really good at it and made lots of money, but after 7 years doing concrete work, I started having problems with my knees and the Doctor told me if I didn't get off of my knees, that I would not walk when I was 50 and when I started thinking, I realized I hated doing this work.  In June, 1983, I told June (my wife) that I wanted to go back to school and get a job where I was not on my hands and knees all the time.  Without an income, I really couldn't just stop work and go back to school and with a concrete business going 7 days a week, 16 hours a day, I really didn't have the drive to try to go to school at the same time.

Future Subjects:

The House at Virgilia Mine.

My Friends.  Tom Schmid, Ron Schmid, Scott Lawson, Larry Forcino, Butch Forcino, Dennis Forcino, Kenny Risley, Mike Risley, Lee Folla, Eddie Heater, Bobby Batchelor

My Parent’s Friends.  Harry and Hazel Forcino, Ed and Celine Becker, Dixie and Earl Hamilton, Bud and Lee Geddis, Wayne Batchelor, Andy Tidwell, Hilder Hockenson, Ed and Emmy Hammerick, Eva Eyraud, Earl and Clarita Fischer, Scott Kelley, Chick Chichester (Stories, the Apple Ranch, the Claim, Goats, Horses, Apple Picking, Apple Cider, Drivers Training),

The Old Stump.

My First Fish.

My First Deer.

The Back Road.

My Bicycle

The Mini-bikes and Motorcycles

Learning to Drive. (Starting the 1952 Chevy Pickup at Rich Bar on the hill at 8 years old, Dad giving me the keys when I asked, getting stuck the first time, Knocking out the corner recreation room support post with the truck, Cats in the engine compartment of the truck on a cold morning)

My First Car.  It was a 1972 Chevrolet Biscayne, two door, straight six cylinder, the clutch, the gear shift, the engine) that I bought from Edna Shafer after her husband Frank passed away

Hundreds of Miles of Back Roads.

Lassen Park.

Trains.

Ed and Scotty Taylor

Swimming and Diving. (Virgilia Bridge, White Rock, Terry Riffles)

Catching Crawdads.

Riding the Rapids in Winter.

Camping and Hiking.  Camping in a Cave.

The Virgilia Mine.

Pensacola, Florida and Naval Photography School.

MCAS (H) Santa Ana, California.

MCAS Iwakuni.

Home Again.

Reno, NV

The Women in My Life

The Birth of My Children

My Children’s Personalities

     In August, 1993, the results of the Warrant Officer Selection Board were released and I was not selected.  I sat down with June to discuss what I needed to do to be able to take care of my family and how my Career would go.  It didn’t seem to be too big of a problem except that the Marine Corps had taken Warrant Officer off of the table.  My normal progression would have to be either a promotion to Master Sergeant where I could stay as technical in the IT field as possible until I could retire which was still 5 ½ years away or promotion to First Sergeant where I would plan on staying in the Marine Corps until my forced retirement of 30 years of service. 

     After a month of submitting resumes, I had gotten several inquiries and even had a company fly me to San Francisco to work for them for 2 weeks to see if it were a good fit for everyone concerned.  I took 2 weeks leave and went to San Francisco and worked for the company and at the end of the two weeks they were impressed with my skills, happy with the way I treated their customers, and they made me a tentative offer.  I told them thanks but, I needed to discuss this with my wife and we still had six months before it was critical for them or for us.