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When we went to visit our Aunt and Uncle, we also stopped at Don and Evelyn Chisum’s home. It was a post-Victorian building with three bedrooms and a full bathroom upstairs and a master bedroom, another full bathroom, kitchen, dining and living room on the bottom floor.

During one visit, Dad went upstairs to use the bathroom as the one down stairs was occupied. He reappeared a couple minutes later. He came to the top of the stairs and stepped out into nothingness.

Dad spilled out of the bottom of the staircase with an awful thud and jus’ laid where he had fallen. I couldn’t believe what I had jus’ witnessed.

Within seconds everyone in the house was in the living room to see if he was okay. It took Dad a minute but he finally rolled over onto his back and worked his way to he feet.

He said he wanted to take a moment to make sure nothing was broken on his body, then he got up and brushed himself off. As soon as it was apparent he was going to be okay, the question, “What happened?” was asked.

Without hesitating, Dad yanked his two-day old and first set of bifocal glasses off his face, answering, “These g-d damned glasses are going to be the death of me!”

Mom and dad were going to a function at the airbase. For the event mom went out and purchased a bright red dress.

They left the house at around six that evening and returned before jus’ 11 o’clock that night. Both looked nice as they left for the evening.

Dad was first through the door. He headed for his favorite chair, picking up the local news paper to start reading.

Mom however went into the kitchen to see if all of the chores were completed as instructed. From there she walked into the hallway.

And at the end of the hallway hung a large mirror.

Mom suddenly screamed, rushing towards her bedroom. She slammed and locked the door behind herself.

She must have seen what we all saw. Her bright red dress was turned inside out.

Mom and Dad were gone for the day. They left Adam and I with Ma and Pa Sanders.

We were forbidden to return to our home for any reason. However we disobeyed because we wanted to play with our new roller skates.

The two of us roller skated up and down Redwood Drive and in the huge parking lot of the old Bizzards building, now owned by Simpson Timber Company all day long. We were pretty worn out by the time day light started to fade.

Having to get back to Ma and Pa’s before the street lamps came on, we pulled the skates from our feet. Adam picked them up and went inside our home.

A few seconds later he came back and we rushed over to Ma and Pa’s home a couple of fence-lines away.

When Dad came to pick us up, I could tell we were in trouble. Once inside the truck I found out why.

Adam didn’t put the skates back in our closet like he was supposed too. Instead, frightened of being in our house, alone, he set them inside the front door.

That’s where Mom tripped over them.

For three months, I worked at the Requa Inn. I was filling in for my brother, Adam after he broke his arm in a bicycle accident.

At first Adam tried to blame Dad for breaking his arm. That’s because Dad grabbed it after Adam attempted to stab me with a dinner fork.

Dr. Kasper said it was already broken by the time Dad stopped Adam. Unfortunately Dad helped the fracture along and he felt bad about it for a long time afterwards.

Because I was jus’ filling-in, I busted my hump trying to do a better job than my kid-brother had ever thought of doing. Not only did I wash dishes, I bused tables, took out the trash, and even found time to do a little fooling around.

A waitresses and I slipped up stairs one evening, to spend several minutes in the room, legendary western novel and sports writer Zane Grey always slept in. However I had no idea about this piece of trivia at the time.

As we were leaving the room, the woman said in a matter of fact whisper, “You know, Zane Grey slept here.”

I remember thinking, “I wonder if he’ll mind?”

Mom and Dad had spent three months paneling the living room and hallway. They also put squares of gold-veined mirror up in the front room hoping to make the area look bigger.

One of the extra things they did was to mount into the wall an old piece of ship’s timber that acted as a resting place for our telephone. It was about five-feet long, two-and-half feet wide, three-inches thick and about four-feet off the ground.

One of the things that occurred every time the phone rang was a mad-dash for the hallway.  It was during one of these mad-dashes, we discovered how much Marcy had grown.

She flew out of the bedroom she shared with our sister Deirdre, yelling, “I got it!”

However we soon realized she didn’t “got it.” Instead we heard a large thump followed by an even louder thud.

Marcy had made the corner, but failed to duck out-of-the-way of the ship’s timber. She caught the massive piece of wood with her forehead.

Kid’s being kids — we failed to offer her any help as we were all laughing too hard.

One of the first photographs I ever took was of the stop-sign and telephone pole where Redwood Drive intersects with U.S. 101 in Klamath. I grew up in a home on Redwood Drive and anytime we went anywhere, we had to use that singular intersection to leave our neighborhood.

My parents bought me a Kodak 126 Instamatic, the cheapest camera available at the time and instead of regular film, they got slide-film by accident. I used it anyway.

The class was taught by Mr. Siegel. He was the new 8th grade teacher at Margaret Keating, replacing Mr. Wofford, who had retired the year before.

I liked Mr. Siegel because he was the first teacher who taught something I was truly interested in: photography.

Mr. Siegel was younger than most teachers at MKS.  The girls thought he was cute, the boy thought he was cool and Mr. Fizer thought he was a hippy.

He gave us a basic course on composition, lighting, color and subject. There was no singing, penmanship, math or memorization in his class. Instead he allowed us — he allowed me — to express myself through picture-taking. I had never experienced such freedom before and I enjoyed it so much that I’ve yet to stop taking pictures.

Unfortunately, he taught at MKS only one year.

One of my part-time jobs was working as a summer-school teacher. The position turned out to require more interpersonal skill than I had at the time.

One afternoon I watched as a kid on a motorcycle raced around the playground while students were outside playing. I stopped him and told him he couldn’t be on the school grounds while other children were there. The next day, he returned and I confiscated the motorcycle.

I locked it up in the school’s office and called my supervisor Paul Rosenthal and the Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office.

Minutes after hanging up, I found myself confronted by a very angry mother. Mrs. Teri Fisher was demanding that I give her son’s motor bike back, which I did.

She was mad as all get-out at me and cussed me up one side and down the other as if she were a sailor. I returned the favor.

Later that evening her husband came to our home and confronted me. He read me the riot act in a language one usually only heard out in the woods where the loggers worked.

In essence he let me know it was not polite to use foul language in the presence of a woman. Being a smart-aleck, I asked, “What woman?”

I was certain he was going to kick my butt right there on our porch.

Mary and Russ Thompson had been visiting the area for years. They came to spend their summertime fishing for salmon and they always parked their travel trailer in space right behind our home at Camp Marigold.

We came to know them a few years earlier and when they were in town, we often invited them over for dinner. And though they were elderly, they climbed over out backyard fence jus’ like we kids would do.

After dinner one night, we were standing on the front porch chatting, when Mrs. Thompson asked, “Is there supposed to be a fire burning out there?”

She was looking through our rumpus room window and out the back door window. We all looked in the direction she was looking and we could see flames dancing up through the pane of glass.

Mom answered, “No.”

A sudden panic swept through all of us. We scattered, rushing to get to the fire before it caught the side of the house ablaze.

It was a plastic garbage can that Mom had placed a bag of ashes from the fireplace in. The bag of ashes had been setting out on the porch in a metal bucket for the passed two days so she believed them to be safe to throw away.

While Dad grabbed the garden hose, I got the fire extinguisher from the tool bench. He was already spraying the fire down when I aimed the extinguisher at the flame.

The garbage can melted down and some of the paint near the backdoor blistered, but nothing else was damaged. It was our good fortune that the Thompson’s had come over for a visit that evening.

Unfortunately, the fire extinguisher failed to work, when I squeezed the trigger. That’s because years before Adam and I had been playing with it when we should not have been.

Yeah, we got in trouble for it, too.

The weather was wonderful for a winter-day in Northern Nevada, as last year at this time the region was covered in a blanket of snow. It was also made wonderful by the fact that the state’s constitution was in full swing and anyone who wanted to watch it operate was allowed to do so.

For the first time in 22-years of living in Northern Nevada, I attended the inauguration of Nevada’s Governor. I wanted to be there for the ceremony because he is a friend and I am very happy for him and his success.

Jim Gibbons was elected as these state’s 29th Governor after a hotly and sometimes intensely bitter campaign. Prior to this he was the 2nd District representative to the U.S. Congress. His resume includes having been a Nevada State Assemblyman and a combat pilot in both Vietnam and Desert Storm .

What I also enjoyed was seeing the number of dignitaries who came to the inauguration. There was Richard Bryan, Barbara Vucanovich, Bob Miller, Sharron Angle and Bill Raggio, to name a few. Even former gubernatorial candidate Bob Beers was there to congratulate Jim Gibbons.

Absent from the crowds was Nevada’s 28th Governor, Kenny Guinn. He said he didn’t want to be there because it was Gibbon’s day and he didn’t want to be the focus. But he did manage yesterday to announce the availability of his new book, documenting his 8 years in office .

All this aside, I enjoyed watching our state government work like it should. It is one of the pleasures of being a U .S. citizen and everybody should attend an event like the one held yesterday.

This is also why the United States is entrusted to defend those countries that do not have a system as great as ours system, as imperfect as it may SEEM. There isn’t a system as free as ours anywhere in the world.

My junior year civic’s class teacher was a Jules Legier.  One guy, two unusual names in a school full of Bob’s, Bill’s and Tom’s.

One day Mr. Legier chastised the entire class for not being able to spell “Crescent City.”  Evidently some of the students were having difficulty with the proper name of the town.

He scratched out the words “CRESCENT CITY” on the chalk board behind his desk. Mr. Legier then scribbled out the words”CRESENT CITY” The word “Crescent” was misspelled.

As soon as the class was seated, he launched into his talk about how they lived in Crescent City and that they should know how to spell it correctly and how he couldn’t understand why we couldn’t get it right. It didn’t make any sense to me either, because I knew how spell the name of my hometown.

Suddenly, Mr. Legier ordered me to the chalkboard, assigning me the task of spelling the name of my hometown correctly.  He erased the correct and incorrect spellings then handed me the chalk.

Like a good student, I obeyed Mr. Legier and promptly wrote down the correct spelling. The class snickered in unison as the teacher turned red.

Mr. Legier had forgotten where I lived.  On the chalkboard in white-yellow letters was the name “KLAMATH’ and it was spelled correctly.