First Steps

Here's ol' Gus either about to take his first solo steps, or pretty close to them.  In carefully looking at this picture just now, for the first time in nearly 67-years, I saw something new to me...my father's WWII AAF wings are pinned to my chest !  

Little more than a year before this picture, Dad was in the nose of a B-17 bound for Germany, hoping like hell they wouldn't blow him out of the sky.  That's Mom, the bobby soxer, helping out with a steady hand; she's 24 and had already soled sometime before this.  Pretty amazing to contemplate what has transpired between those first steps and this morning's. 

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  Betty Jane DeVoe - a charmer

Alice Bretz - born with that winning smile

Kendall McCook - Always a cowboy?

Susan Begley - First Missing Tooth

Paul Shields - Confident

Tom Koebernick - Table Dancer !
I still have that table...it belonged to my great grandmother.

 Sam Scott III - Always a serious kid

Sam's Dad (Sam II) flew Navy transports around the Pacific during WWII and afterward joined Panagra as a pilot.  This picture was most likely taken in South America where his Dad was based about this time.  Sam was a quiet kid, smart, and our finest '63 CLAN football player; a 3-year letterman in that sport and an All-District pick our 1962 championship season.  To me, he always seemed a little detached from our daily scrum, in a world of his own design.  Perhaps his younger years spent in other parts of the world settled on him a degree of sophistication that others of us had not yet attained, or ever would.  I was fortunate to count him as one of my closer friends--Gus.  

 Larry Guthrie & Danny McCoy - Humor's Genisis 

These two played off one another all the way through school.  I never knew they went this far back together.

Phil Vinson - Lawn Boy 

Phil’s in here by invitation and nominated as an honorary ’63 Highlander.  Although a Poly ’59, Phil’s contributions as an author, former S-T writer, UTA professor, photographer, to this blog, and as a noted East Side historian are impeccable.  If you don’t know of him, you should.  He was roaming around our neighborhoods and suffered through Meadowbrook Junior High (Creel Phillips, Jane Sheets, and probably that library lady that hated me) from its first year in 1953….a few years before us.

Judy - Age 2 - A beauty from the beginning.


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