On July 10th, 1962, a Tuesday, at 11:06 pm, at Mercy Hospital in Oelwein, Iowa, I came into this world. My mother was 22, my dad 29, and they had already provided me with an older brother and sister! So I was lucky number three. Seeing as how I was born in July, my birthstone is the ruby and my sign is Cancer.

To give you a little history, in 1962, John F. Kennedy, a 42-year-old Catholic, was President of the United States. Many refer to that time in American history as “Camelot”. It was absolutely a different time politically, socially, racially, globally.

And it was a time when men weren’t welcome in the delivery room. My dad said that when my brother Jim was born two years earlier, their first child, he drove mom to the hospital, stuck around for a little while and when things weren’t moving along quickly, went back to work. He wasn’t getting paid time off after all! (I guess some things haven’t changed that much). The doctor’s bill was $200, which they paid for in cash, some of it in silver dollars.

Obviously, I don’t remember much about the day I was born, or even the next couple of years. I think my first memory was when I was about 3, I remember a black cricket in the bottom of the white porcelain tub. That’s it, just the cricket in the tub. We moved from that house when I was three, but in the photos, I’ve seen of it, I know the house was pink. Why was our house pink you ask? Well, funny thing, my mom said my dad loved that color and painted it himself. And it was tiny! It was a “little pink house” (cue John Cougar Mellencamp).

Aurora, Iowa was a tiny town with no streetlights, no grocery stores, a volunteer fire department and two taverns. And my dad owned one of them. I think it had been a dream of his to be his own boss, and owning a tavern made sense because he and all his buddies were drinkers. They grew up in that time of honky-tonks, Hank Williams, and moonshine. My dad got a taste for whiskey early and they always say stick with what you know, right? Unfortunately, it was a short-lived experiment, what with three kids under the age of 3, my mom having to work to help support the family, my dad working all hours trying to keep the business afloat, and my grandma not loving being the sitter every day. They ended up selling the tavern back to the guy they bought it from a few years later and my dad was never his own boss again.

Even though my memory of that place and time in that little town is one I’ve scripted from photo images only, for some reason it holds a place near and dear to my heart.

Origin story.