| (Sigh) Maybe someday I'll finish this thing....
Chapter 1 Before Abilene I was born in Houston, Texas on September 15, 1946 to John and Mary Swayne. A brother and a sister, Mike and Kathy, had been born before me, and another brother, Lloyd, was born after me. We lived in a small house in a suburb of Houston. My earliest memory is of me looking out the screen door of that house. I would have to have been 3 or younger, because when I was 3, we moved to Colorado City, a small town in central west Texas. My father had obtained a job for a company called Pan American Pipeline Company. His job was to service and repair microwave repeating stations. These were how folks transmitted high frequency radio signals across the country before the advent of communication satellites. The repeating stations were located out in the middle of nowhere, usually on top of the highest hill in the area. Sometimes my dad would pile us kids in his pickup and haul us out to the job site with him. Mom would ride up front. It would be a kind of family picnic while he did his work. We would ride up a winding, scary dirt road to the top of the hill. The view was always spectacular up there, and it was always windy, which was welcome in the hot Texas sun. In Colorado City, we lived across the street from an old lady who kept goats, and used their milk. Sometimes we would have goat's milk. After a few years in Colorado City, we moved to San Angelo, a slightly larger town. Dad continued to work for Pan American Pipeline. San Angelo is where I started to school. I remember having to walk to school. There was a small creek we had to cross on the way, and there was a small concrete dam across the creek near where the road crossed it. Sometimes we would walk across the top of the dam instead of on the road. I seem to remember one of my brothers falling in, but the memory is not clear. I don't think I was there, but was told about it. While I was in the first grade, my dad had the first of several surgical procedures done on his heart. He had contracted rheumatic fever while he was in the Army, and it damaged his heart. This was 1953, and heart surgery was not common then. The surgery was performed in Houston by Dr. Denton Cooley, one of the pioneers in the field. My dad had calcium deposits on his heart valves, which had to be removed. While my folks were in Houston, we kids were divided up among friends of our parents. I stayed with some people who lived out in the country and raised chickens and turkeys. I had to go to a small country school during that time, with grades 1 to 3 in the same room. I did fine, though. My mother had already taught me to read before I ever set foot in a classroom. Chapter 2 Abilene After the second grade, my dad lost his job at Pan American. He soon found a new job, but it meant another move, this time to Abilene, Texas. Abilene was a town of about 50,000 at the time -- it seemed like a big city. The company my dad worked for was called Irvine Radiotelephone Service. It was the Motorola dealer for that area. In those days, Motorola did not make cell phones and pagers; they made commercial radio communications equipment, such as police car radios. My dad's job was to service such equipment. We stayed in Abilene through my junior year in high school, so I consider Abilene as the town where I grew up. On our first Christmas there, I got my first bicycle. It was a 16-inch bike (a big one). My parents always believed in getting things that would last, so they got me a bike I wouldn't grow out of. In spite of it being too big for me, I learned to ride it quickly. At first, the only way I could get on it was to climb onto it from the steps of our front porch, and the only way I could get off was to just let it fall over in the grass with me on it. But I soon learned less radical ways of getting on and off, and that bike became my main means of transportation to school through the 6th grade, and any place else I wished to go. In those days, instead of middle school covering grades 6 through 8, we had junior high covering grades 7 through 9. Now the elementary school I had been going to was called Albert Sidney Johnston Elementary school, named after a Confederate Civil War general. The junior high school I went to was Lincoln Junior High, named after Abraham Lincoln. How's that for contrast? Junior high was the most unremarkable period of my schooling. The most stand-out things I remember from that period are biology class, in which I got to dissect a frog, and the cute Russian girl that sat next to me in biology class (I wish I could remember her name). It is also the only period during my schooling in which I rode a bus to and from school. It wasn't a school bus, however, but a city bus, and it cost ten cents a ride each way. Any time I had to stay after school, I usually walked home, because the busses were infrequent, and stopped running fairly early in the evening. It was a fairly long walk, and took at least an hour. My high school period was when things really started happening, not only in school, but also in general. That was the early 60's, the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination, and other events that affected everyone. A direct result of the missile race between the US and the Soviet Union happened right in our town, Abilene. The Air Force, which already had a base there, decided to install some missile silos in the area. The company my dad worked for was given the contract to install communications equipment. One day, my dad, my brothers and I were given a tour through one of the silos (there was no missile in it yet). It was a remarkable structure -- a multistory building inside a concrete cylinder under the ground. The building was suspended from the top of the cylinder by huge springs, and did not touch it anywhere else. The springs were to absorb the shock of a close-by nuclear explosion. On a later day, in a big media show, the Air Force drove an Atlas missile (the type that was to go in the silos) on the back of a truck trailer right through downtown Abilene. That was supposed to make us feel better? Luckily, the Atlas missile was obsolete a few years later, and the Air Force decided not to replace the ones around Abilene with newer models. I never found out what became of the silos. Maybe they're written up in an X-File somewhere. Although obsolete as a weapon, modernized versions of the Atlas are still used as space launch vehicles. It was the kind of rocket used to launch John Glenn into orbit. In high school, I decided to take Latin, which turned out to be a source of fun as well as education. I joined the Latin club, and took part in the annual Latin banquet and "slave auction" in which first year Latin students were auctioned off to second year students. I was bought by a nice looking girl, and as her slave, I had to carry her books around for a prescribed period of weeks. I didn't mind that at all. She had bought 2 or 3 other slaves, and after the banquet, she took us cruising in her car and at each stop light we had to engage in a "Chinese fire drill" (get out of the car and run around it). I wound up taking that girl to the homecoming football game. I bought her a corsage for the event (it was a tradition), which was the first time I had bought one. Besides the fun Latin turned out to be one of the best thing I did in school. In Latin class, I gained a fascination for languages and grammar, which helped me to comprehend anything I read better. And when computers came along, I found their languages just as fascinating as human languages, which is why I wound up writing computer software for a living. The moral of this paragraph? Language is the tool of thought. Master it and you can master anything. |