Pat

Name: Pat

Occupation: Blogger and Artist

Decade Born: 1950’s

Location: Texas

“May you be in heaven a half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.”

The memories that you have from your childhood home, do those compare to the memories you have in your home now?

My childhood home was a very small, wood-frame farm house in the countryside where we moved when I was about 3. We were poor- I never really realized the difference between me and the other kids I went to school with until I was in my teens, but it was a house that was filled with love. Very different set of parents for that time- they were very forward thinking- they both grew up and should have been a redneck west Texas people, but they were both very liberal and at that time encouraged my sister who is 4 years older than me and I to be whatever women we decided we wanted to be. Yet my mother, was a person who still felt constraints on her generationally to not be the woman she chose to be, but they brought us up to be very self-sufficient, strong-willed- even to sometimes to a fault- women who could do anything they set their minds to. My father didn’t have a high school education, but he was brilliant. In the service, he scored the highest score ever scored on their intelligence exams, but because of the time of his life and geography and when he was a very young man- late 20s, early 30s- World War II had completely changed where his life was going.

Where did he serve?

He flew actually- B-29 bombers and did the photography for Hiroshima Nagasaki. I have his flight books and a lot of his memorabilia, but the imagery he actually took was classified of course at the time. I’m sure it’s unclassified by now. Bay of Pigs invasion, he was gone for 4 weeks because they called him back up in reserves.