60 Years Ago Today
I was 8 weeks old. I weighed 10 pounds 6 ounces and was 21" tall, according to my mother's record keeping in my baby book.
50 Years Ago Today
I had just started the fifth grade in Mrs. Carigan's class at Monroe Street Elementary School in Delphi, Ind. The desks were the old row-style where the back of one desk supported the front of the one behind it. They were impossibly old, had hinged lid writing surfaces and a hole for an inkwell in the upper right corner.
40 Years Ago Today
I had flunked out of Indiana State University at the end of my sophomore year and had been working all summer at the RCA TV and stereo cabinet factory in Monticello, Ind. Having lost my student deferment from the draft at a time when Vietnam was heating up, military service was inevitable. Consequenty, I enlisted in the U.S. Air Force as a way of preserving at least some measure of control over my destiny. After all, the Air Force didn't have an infantry and that fact alone made it unlikely that I'd get thrown into combat. I was 13 days away from my date with the Armed Forced Induction Center in Indianapolis and I was resigned to spending the next four years in uniform.
30 Years Ago Today
I had been married eight years and had two sons - aged 7 and 4. I had nine years of newspaper work behind me and was a reporter on the state/suburban desk of the largest evening daily in the state. I had a mortgage, was driving a green 1971 VW Karmann Ghia convertible and was smoking three packs of Viceroy cigarettes a day.
20 Years Ago Today
I had just bought my fourth motorcycle - a graphite gray 1981 BMW R100RS, which was my first real sport touring motorcycle and the one that introduced me to the pleasures of transcontinental rides. I had quit smoking and was in my third year as an instructor with the Motorcycle Safety Foundation, as well as my 19th year with the newspaper. I had been running a suburban bureau, covering the fastest-growing area of the state since March of that year.
10 Years Ago Today
I was nearly two years divorced and was involved in a pointless long-distance relationship with a woman in Sayville, NY, who I had met on American Online. I was living in a two-bedroom apartment and was eight days from the merger of my paper and its sister morning daily - a development that meant I was folded into a larger suburban bureau representing both papers. I was driving a black '94 Honda del Sol and my motorcycle was a pearl silver '91 BMW K100RS which I'd already put about 70,000 mile on. I eventually reitred it at 160,000 miles.
5 Years Ago Today
I had just completed my 15th Annual Mid-Life Crisis Tour - a three-week, 6,086-mile motorcycle jaunt on my K100RS and was back at work in the suburban news bureau, hoping the new owners of the paper would offer senior staffers like myself an early retirement package. I was living in a condominium and was managing my mother's affairs after my then-girlfriend, now-wife, Maria and I were forced to move her out of the home she shared with my father since 1953 and into a retirement/nursing home. None of us realized, on this day in 2000, that my mother had less than a month to live.
1 Year Ago Today
I rode my newish '03 BMW K1200GT to Saturday morning breakfast with my BMW Club friends and Maria went to her Second Saturday quilting meeting.
Today
Maria and I drove home from a delightful overnight visit with my son Steve, his wife Nicky and our granddaughter Lisa in Cincinnati. We're driving an '03 Subaru Forester, but I still have the del Sol, which is running fine after 11 years and 180,000 miles.
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