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.

It was an April morning when Tommy spoke with Roberta. Her husband had been killed in Iraq in October of the previous year. He wanted to find out why the Sergeant didn’t have plaque at the Fernley Veterans Cemetery near the couples home.

“The veteran’s administration is refusing to allow the Wiccan symbol to be placed on his plaque,” Roberta said.

Tommy was appalled by this news and immediately set about investigating the refusal. In his way of thinking and being a military veteran himself, the U.S. Constitution should have protected the rights of Roberta’s husband who had died for his country. It appeared it hadn’t worked in the case of his family

Tommy wanted to know why. Not only did he interview Roberta but he spoke with several people who had been fighting the same injustice for nearly ten-years. “What do you mean “nearly ten-years?” Tommy asked the Sergeant’s widow.

“The Department of Veteran Affairs has refused the Wiccan Symbol of faith for nearly ten-years because they claim that there isn’t a centralized church to represent the religion,” Roberta replied.

Tommy was on the telephone to former commanding officer Colonel Jim Gibbons, who retired after Desert Storm and ran for the U.S. Congress and won. He was now a candidate for Nevada’s Governorship.

“How can a soldier die for his country and then be refused the symbol of his religious preference,” Tommy asked Gibbons.

“I don’t have any idea, but I’m gonna find out right away,” the Congressman told Tommy.

Meanwhile, Tommy worked for three days researching and writing the news story. He also realized that even though he would “break” the story, it would only appear in the Sparks Tribune.

“There’s got to be a way to make a bigger splash with this story,” he said to himself as he continued to write the article.

The following morning Tommy called a his friend in Las Vegas, whom he’d met while covering another news story. Tommy explained to him how he felt it was more important to get the story out to all the media outlets, rather than allowing it to run in a small town paper and go nowhere.

“Here’s how we’ll do it,” he told Tommy. “You collect and write the information. I’ll use my name on the byline here and give you credit at the bottom and you do the same up there. We’ll run the story on the same day.”

The two conspirators agreed that their article would run on a Friday, however because someone didn’t like the size of Tommy’s article, they chopped it into three parts. The story didn’t run on Friday as planned, coming out on Saturday, Sunday and Tuesday.

Tommy realized that he was in a bad position. It would look as if he had plagiarized the story and that he could find himself fired from his job.

He had Monday’s off, but that didn’t prevent Angela from calling him on his cell-phone and instructing him to meet with her at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, the day the third installment was published.

When he arrived at the office, Angela was already there. He went directly to publisher office where he knew she’d be since he was out of town most of the time.

“This is crap,” she said. “You took this story almost line for line from this article.”

Angela held up a copy she had printed from the internet. It was written slightly different from Tommy’s but contained most of the material and quotes from his various sources. Then she added, “I have half a mind to fire you for this.”

Tommy sat there quietly. He didn’t say anything because he was certain that she would not listen or hear what he was saying. Tommy figured that Angela had her mind made up already and that there was no sense in attempting to explain what happened.

“Care to tell me how this happened?” she demanded.

Slowly Tommy laid out the details about how he had called his friend and together they planned to get the news story out in a bigger way than the Tribune could. Angela surprised Tommy by quietly listening.

“We had planned to run it on the same day, but it got split into three installments and was a day behind,” Tommy said. “That screwed everything up.”

“What you two did is wrong,” Angela said after Tommy finished talking. “This looks exactly like plagiarism on your part.”

She also said that once an article is published in a paper, that article was property of that newspaper. Angela told Tommy that she would discuss the matter with publisher and together they’d decide what to do about it.

Tommy worked for the next day and a half with what he felt was a gray cloud hanging over his head. He had succeeded in helping Roberta get her story out about her dead husband’s denial of a religious symbol, but now he believed that he would be getting fired for having done it the way he did.

“Look,” he said once the publisher arrived in the office later that week, “All I wanted to do was get it up onto the newswire. That’s something we don’t have the pleasure of doing around here like they do in Las Vegas.”

The publisher politely listened and then replied, “I’m just going to call it a mistake that you’ve learned from. Don’t do it again though.”

Tommy said, “Thanks, I won’t make that mistake again.”