When We Were Young

About the Book

Growing up during the depression in Eastern Kentucky is a far cry from living in the Metropolitan San Francisco Area. Almost anything you can think of was different. In an effort to preserve for subsequent generations what it was like, I have set down to words a few recollections to dumbfound the young and bemuse the old. Life was just different, and it wasn't that long ago - to me , anyway, at age 87. The stories and descriptions are meant to record, to amuse and perhaps befuddle younger generations, with their impossibilities, memories and verbal pictures. They are meant mainly for my nephews and nieces who never had the "benefit" of living as described, but who have tired of listening to it, so that they don't pass it on. Perhaps this will jog their memories and cause them to record something of their own lives for succeeding generations.

About the Author

Born and raised in a small town in Eastern Kentucky, I served in the Marine Corps in WWII in the South Pacific before returning to the states to go to school. After getting a degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, I moved to the West Coast to work for a large corporation as an engineer. A bout with Tb forced a vacation that caused a change in life perspective, and allowed the getting of a law degree at the University of California - Berkeley, and subsequent law practice in Berkeley, before moving to a small town in Indiana for law practice. Six years there, with cases coming in that reflected the difference in life style, I returned to Berkeley and the San Francisco Bay Area, where I now live in retirement. Now, over fifty years later, the composition and the character of the legal matters I handled loom large in retrospect. They reflect the raw side of life that a "country lawyer" had to deal with in stark contrast to what I had left and what I returned to in the city practice. These stories are of real people, with real problems, that reflect the raw side of life as seen from in front of the bench and sometimes from behind it when I was asked to sit as judge.