A popular cartoonist of the thirties and forties often used the theme, \u201cBorn Thirty Years Too Soon.\u201d\u00a0 In the late sixties a friend remarked that Ken was born thirty years too late.\u00a0 The person said that Ken would have either saddled his horse and rode west or he would have put his family in a covered wagon and moved.\u00a0 About the same time, one of his students at the University of Arizona remarked that he would have made a good pioneer in an earlier era.\u00a0 Through the years a few others have agreed.<\/p>\n
Our marriage began as a blend of a status quo person and a risk taker.\u00a0 I soon learned that his risks were logical and well thought out and that he always had a Plan B to fall back on.\u00a0 He remains unafraid of change to this day.<\/p>\n
I have gone along with most of his risks except homesteading in Alaska.\u00a0 We had all of the information and his argument was that we would only have to live on the land for 6 months of the year.\u00a0 I was sure that I would end up in the snow frozen to death.\u00a0 I told him that he would not need a large cabin for only one person.\u00a0 Now that I have been to Alaska, I would consider it if age were not a factor. \u00a0Had he persuaded me to go, we would probably still be there.<\/p>\n
Another risk that was scrapped was to buy a moving van.\u00a0 When we moved from Tucson, Arizona, to Harlingen, Texas, he recommended two people who would be graduating from the rehabilitation program at the University of Arizona for the facility in Harlingen.\u00a0 They were hired and another graduate student took a job as a rehabilitation counselor in Harlingen.\u00a0 They would be moving within three months of our move.\u00a0 All of the men would be state employees so there was no monetary allowance for relocation.\u00a0 A moving company in Tucson had a van for sale.\u00a0 Ken\u2019s idea was to buy the van, move all four families and then resell the van.\u00a0 The other three guys were not as enthusiastic as Ken, but they all went to look at the van.\u00a0 It looked good and seemed to be O.K. mechanically.\u00a0 Figures were put on paper including insurance and possible repairs.\u00a0 Everything seemed sensible except the time and expense of empty miles back to Tucson after each move.\u00a0 All of us went back to plan A and individually rented U-Haul trucks to move.\u00a0 We hired a moving company employee to supervise and friends volunteered to help.\u00a0 Three of our friends held a Ph.D. in their field.\u00a0 That surely gave us a little class.<\/p>\n
Ken was born in Oklahoma the fourth of six children and was an adventurous boy.\u00a0 At age two he pulled a pan of boiling jelly off the stove onto his head.\u00a0 His mother grabbed a towel and started wiping it off.\u00a0 One side of his face was badly burned and scarred.\u00a0 As he grew older the skin became less and less discolored to the point that our granddaughters had never noticed it until we told them the story of his accident.\u00a0 He and his older brothers were mischievous and kept his mother busy cutting switches. \u00a0He started working as a paper boy at a young age in Ada, OK.\u00a0 He learned o drive on an ice delivery truck in Breckenridge, TX.\u00a0 He did farm labor.\u00a0 He delivered milk for my Dad.\u00a0 He worked at the Palace Theatre in Breckenridge and at 18 he started working in the oil fields as a roughneck on drilling rigs.\u00a0 He was on a drilling rig in San Angelo, TX, in January of 1952, in subzero temperature.\u00a0 He was driving nails into a piece of sheet iron on the rig floor.\u00a0 He took a break and went into the dog house to get warm.\u00a0 He removed two pairs of gloves he was wearing and discovered that he had been hitting his thumb.\u00a0 He had lost feeling in his hands from the cold.\u00a0 He made the decision that he needed to get an education and do something else.<\/p>\n
He entered North Texas State College (Now University of North Texas) in the fall of 1952.\u00a0 He worked in the library for 30 cents an hour to help meet expenses. \u00a0He had been making up to $1.50 an hour on the rigs.\u00a0 He got a break during his last semester.\u00a0 Four large oil companies joined in a venture and\u00a0started drilling a deep exploratory well just west of Denton.\u00a0 He went to work as a roughneck on the morning tour.\u00a0 (Tour is pronounced tower and the hours are 11PM to 7 AM.)\u00a0 He had a philosophy class at 8 AM.\u00a0 The teacher was notorious for punctuality.\u00a0 Ken went in and talked to him about what he was going to do.\u00a0 The professor told him not to worry if he was late.\u00a0 The crew was gracious to the college boy and would tell him to nap or study when he wasn\u2019t needed on the floor.<\/p>\n
He graduated on May 26, 1955, and we married on May 28, 1955.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A popular cartoonist of the thirties and forties often used the theme, “Born Thirty Years Too Soon.” In the late sixties a friend remarked that Ken was born thirty years too late. The person said that Ken would have either saddled his horse and rode west or he would have put his family in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-pioneer-man"],"yoast_head":"\n