The Best of times?

 

Memories seem to flash by way too quickly to catch all of them and remember them as I should. So when I do, I write them down so that my great-granddaughter can tell my great-great-granddaughter who I was and who her ancestors were. They will not have known me as I wish they would have because I will be gone by that time. I wish I had known my great grandparents even a little. I now look at names and I wonder who they were and did they have the same likes and dislikes as me? Would they have liked me or would they have even cared?

My Dad was a good man in his younger days with us and took the time to do things with us. I remember one day in the back yard he was carving toy guns with just a pocket knife that look amazing, well at least to a 3-year-old boy (me). He made a revolver that the cylinder turned on it. He made two long rifles that also looked real for a carving. It is one of the only times I remember my father not yelling at me or calling me stupid. He just didn’t have the patience with me as he did my brother because he had gotten older and wore himself out with all the neighborhood boys on the baseball teams.

I understand how hard I was on him now, but it did hurt as a small boy that looked up to him and loved him that had no concept of age and tolerance. I see him in me with my grandson when I have had to deal with him one on one. I mean well and so did my father but we are a product of our upbringing I hope that becoming a US Marine will break the cycle of this for my grandson's sake.

My mother on the other hand got me, and did everything she could for me and even took on two couches and a principle on my behalf in a battle over “The Airways Jr. High Great Side Burn Scandal of 1974”.

The year I left to go to Canada, I first went to see my Grandfather Whitehead and spent the night with him. That was the last time I got to talk with him or saw him. He told me his favorite story of a date he had with the prettiest girl he had ever seen (before our Grandmother Whitehead, of course).  He rode his mule into town and went with her to a picture show(remember this would have been in the 1890s to the early 1900s). A person who knew him stopped him on his way home after the show and told him that the girl was a black girl and he said he didn’t know what to say or do, but he knew he could not see her anymore. Very sad I thought, but life is sad sometimes if we don't try to make it better.

I have been sitting here with my memories, Crying and laughing at the best of times and the worst of times. I’m glad that I’m at the age that even the worst was pretty good!

Thanks for reading the ramblings of an old man's little life!

Keiths Memories In Time: Wonder Filled Life

Keiths Memories In Time: Wonder Filled Life:   It has been many a year scene the cowboys and Indians roomed my neighborhood and Batman and robin rode their bikes down our streets. ...

Wonder Filled Life

 

It has been many a year since the cowboys and Indians roamed my neighborhood and Batman and Robin rode their bikes down our streets.

I still hear those faint echos of the Merry mobile with the popsicles and ice cream treats, bells and music calling to us all.

Life sometimes slows down and allows us to see the times of our past even if it is only a glimpse of the face of someone you remember like the girl you took to the prom or a mistake that sends shivers up your spine. I can't remember as much as I used to but sometimes different memories of the past come to me at times as if to taunt me to look back and remember the days when we were young.

I remember a trip to a shopping center where they had life-size Dinosaurs for us to see and for 50 cents you could make a wax Dino toy to take home. What wonders we saw as children and never noticed the significance of what we saw. I saw in my mind rocks that glowed in the dark at the Pink Palace Museum on a school trip. We, the baby boomer generation had if nothing a full life.

Just think, as our life began, TV was becoming more popular over radio

and commercial flight was becoming affordable and safe. Computers may have been only in a University or government office if at all. Phones were wired to the wall and no social media other than writing a letter.

We’ve seen the growth of the race for space by a government project to companies bidding to be the first on Mars. I have seen science fiction become science fact right before my eyes.

What wounder will I see before I die, and what wonders will my Great-granddaughter see in her lifetime?

I’m not the smartest person out there and I’m not the dumbest either, but I do know we have been a blessed generation with love and wonders that filled our lifetime.

The Queen Of The Skies

Let us go back about 110 years ago when a young girl asked why not. While at an air show in the early days of aviation a girl asked why she couldn’t be one of those daring young aviators in the sky above her?

Keeping in mind her love of the adventure she saw in the freedom of flight, she knew on her first flight that this was where she belonged in the sky, flying her own aircraft. She would go on to fly in and pilot numerous aircraft in her lifetime.

Not only was she the first female to be a passenger to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, she was also the first female pilot to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.

She was a member of the National Woman’s Party and an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment. Who knows what might have happened if things had had a different outcome?

She became one of the most notable females in American and world history when she and Fred Noonan attempted a clandestine flight around the globe. The fight had a number of drawbacks that every pilot today would take for granted. Even the compass they had to rely on was not like the compass that navigators today use. Fred Noonan was one of the best navigators she could have chosen, you see he was one of the team that helped to navigate the flight paths that Pan Am Clippers used to reach the Orient. This was still the time that dead reckoning was the only form of navigation there was. There was no GPS, no radio navigation signal, and what there was, was not in any way as helpful as they are today.

It was July 2, 1937, on the leg from Lae, New Guinea to Howland Island, desperately trying to reach the safety of Howland Island. It is a widely held belief that they ran out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific Ocean never to be heard from again.

There have been many searches for the Pilot and her navigator, starting with the largest search and rescue mission for a Civilian aircraft ever launched by F.D.R. There were many more private missions launched in the years following their disappearance. Even with today’s modern technology, still no substantiated, beyond the shadow of a doubt, evidence of them has ever been found. She was declared dead in absentia on Jan. 5, 1939.

Not only was she a pioneer in aviation, she was and is to this day an inspiration for girls and boys to reach for the skies. Who was she: Amelia Earhart, American born of part German descent. She has become what is known as a Legend. (24 July 1897 – 2 July 1937).

Keiths Memories In Time: Rough Road in Italy

Keiths Memories In Time: Rough Road in Italy: I have taken many an adventure with my wonderful wife Ursula, but the last one was to Rome and Vatican City. It was magical, the sights an...