John P. - Texas

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."  - E.E. Cummings

John is a highly intelligent man who has had great impact in this world. The fact that you are reading this on your computer right now testifies to that fact. Yet, his humility is nearly palpable. When he was little, he wanted to be a cowboy, just like almost all little boys at one point. 

Here he shares all about his childhood dream.

~ Claire

When I was growing up, we would go to the movies and westerns were quite popular then. We would see all the westerns. I thought that that was really a cool thing. Gene Autry was probably one of my favorite actors; he was really very popular in the movies. Of course, there were a lot of westerns on TV too. I liked them all, but we always watched Gunsmoke religiously on TV.

I liked playing cowboy and I had kind of wanted to be a veterinarian. I bought a Bantam rooster and hen from some boy at school. His parents had told him that he needed to get rid of them. I think I paid $0.50 for the rooster and hen together. We didn’t have a farm; we just lived on a little small lot. I kept them in our backyard and I don’t even think we had a pen for them. The funny part was that my mother would go out to hang the clothes up because she didn’t have a dryer. She would keep the clothes in a basket on the ground and that rooster would come up and take the clothes out of the basket and drag them around the yard and she would have to chase the rooster down.

My Bantam hen had laid some eggs once, and I was excited about that. I was in elementary school, in third or fourth grade or somewhere around there. I took packages of gum to school to hand them out like I was a father. Everybody thought that was real funny, but I wasn’t doing it to be funny. Those eggs never did hatch, though.

My friend, Gary, his dad had bought a farm. We would go down there lots of weekends and ride horses, fish in the river, trap raccoons, catch armadillos, hunt and things like that. We weren’t very good at hunting but we did it there, even though it wasn’t a very good place for hunting.

I had always wanted a horse of my own. Some of my friends had horses, and I finally ended up getting a horse too. My friends and I, we rode horses together and we went to horse competitions where they had pole races and barrel races and stuff like that in high school. I ended up raising a couple of colts from my horse.

My mother was a great seamstress. She made clothes for me and she really enjoyed that. And she made hats – back then everybody wore a lot of hats. We all thought we are a bunch of cowboys and a lot of people made blanket coats back then. They were white and had stripes on them. My mother ended up making me a beautiful blanket coat. I wore it and I enjoyed it.

Much later in my life, one of my good friends said, “Man, I envied that coat.” His mother couldn’t sew, so thought it was really special. And, I guess, it really was.