Tuesday, June 25, 2013

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. 



Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Gladys H. - Maryland


"It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun." 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Gladys and Richard were married for 45 years. This is a special story from the beginning of what would become a legacy. It sings of a time when simplicity was beautiful and profound. 

~ Claire


My husband’s name is Richard. We met at West Virginia University. We were both members of the swimming honorary and that’s where we got acquainted. We met in about 1950 or 51 and we dated about a year and a half, maybe a little less than that.




I wasn’t a sorority girl.  When I went off to college, I didn’t really know what rush week was or what it was all about because I had started during the second semester.

But Richard was in a fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, and he gave me his fraternity pin the year before we were married. If you got pinned, that was practically being engaged. That was probably the most special thing, the pinning. It was more special than my engagement ring. It’s a beautiful pin, probably the most beautiful fraternity pin there is. It’s got a shield and sword, and on some of them, the sword could be removed from the shield. His initials were engraved on the back of it with the bond number.

There was a serenade that night. The fraternity brothers came over to my dorm room and stood under my window with Richard standing in front of them. I knew they were coming. It was very exciting and all my friends were there in the room or in the hall or maybe in the rooms next to my dormitory room. In our dormitory, they had terraces up above, and some of my friends were probably standing up in the terraces looking down over it all. I had a candle in the window and came and stood there.

Richard said a few words before they started singing. And then, they would serenade. It was really very impressive. They dressed up nicely too. They all wore a white shirt and a tie, and back then the young men wore blazers.

I was very elated and a little emotional about it.

We were married on August 30th, 1952. And Richard was down there waiting for me at the front of the altar with a big smile on his face. His smile was always very special.


We were married for 45 years. I think the key to a successful marriage is to listen to one another and express your love for each other every day. Do whatever you can do to encourage each other; lift each other up.

I still have that pin that Richard gave me on that special day.