The Early Years

Heeding his father’s advice to “leave these Kentucky hills, there’s nothing for you here”, my dad and mom left Kentucky with my sister and followed a number of their siblings to find auto industry jobs in Detroit. This was about 1939-40, just prior to the U.S. entering World War II.

Dad did go off to support the war effort, serving his country in the U.S. Army in the Pacific theater on the island of Saipan but spending most of his time in the region on Peleliu (in the Palau island group), east of the Philippine Islands, due north of Australia.

His return home in 1946 made possible my entrance into the world the following year. Mom and my older sister were living near relatives on Webb Avenue in Detroit. When I was still a toddler, we moved to “the ‘burbs” in Center Line, into a cooperative development called Kramer Homes. This move took us around 10 miles north of downtown Detroit and into a very nice, middle-class area.

My earliest memories are of those years in Kramer Homes, playing with Bobby McIssack, Billy Sheridan, and my best friend, Tom Marley. We rode our bikes everywhere, played ball in the summer and ice hockey in the winter whenever we had free time. During those years of our youth it seemed we had nothing but free time.

During my year of 5^th Grade, my parents decided to transfer me to a parochial school. We were relatively new members of Trinity Lutheran Church in Warren. In fact, I was nine years old when I was baptized, since we had not been attending any church until then. I didn’t like leaving my school buddies, but I soon found there were many more friends to be made at Trinity School. I have no doubt I received a much better education due to the smaller class sizes and more difficult curricula offered by the parochial schools I attended.