Victor Bailey
My name is Victor Bailey and today is January 11, 2019.
It is my birthday and I am 92 years old.
I was born in 1927, the year Charles Lindberg became famous for flying the Atlantic.
When I was one year old, my parents and I moved to St.Louis County.
About three years later, Charles Lindberg's baby boy was kidnapped and about the same time we moved to a different neighborhood.
Someone in the new neighborhood thought that I might be Lindberg's baby boy, so they reported us to the FBI.
We were arrested and taken down to the FBI headquarters.
After interrogation, we were proven innocent and taken back home.
I may have the reputation of being the youngest person ever to have been arrested and interrogated by the FBI.
I tried to state that my kiddie car was too slow.
Who I am is what my ancestors were.
I don't know why the Bailey's left Scotland or exactly when.
I know the Pilgrims left on the Mayflower in 1620 because of religious persecution.
I know later Bailey's were Quakers.
I also have evidence of business dealings in 1680 by Patrick Bailey, the father of David Bailey, whose last will and testament I have dated 1745.
I believe it took real courage to up and leave the old world and go to the new world to face the unknowns, wild animals, wild people, unknown weather extremes, and so on.
My mother's maiden name was Lachance.
Nicolas Lachance left France with his family because of persecution by the government.
They were royalists and the French Revolution had just ended.
Nicholas was a knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Michael.
Of the original thirteen founders of the village they founded, six were Lachances.
The site later to become Frederictown was named St.Michael's, the Catholic Church was also named St.Michael's.
Six generations of Bailey's after they got to America, Joshua Bailey was born in 1815.
He is my great-great-grandfather and was married four times. He outlived three wives and had nineteen children.
My grandfather and grandmother Bailey lived three miles west of Frederictown from about nineteen and ten on.
Grandma was part Osage Indian and was born on Christmas Day and was one hundred years old when she died.
Grandpa farmed, hunted, and fished to provide for his family. Transportation was by horse and wagon.
After World War I an old man came by grandpa and grandma's looking for work to make a little money so he could see a doctor.
He was very ill.
They had little money but they would take him in and try to help him. He kept getting worse and they knew he probably would not live.
He also suspected he would not live so he called my grandpa in and said, I have a confession to make.
During the war he and some other men to keep out of the war decided to take to the back country and hide out, live off the land, hunt fish, pick berries and fruit and whatever.
They also started robbing banks.
The area they chose was Kern River near Eminence in southeastern Missouri. They decided it was not wise to try to spend the gold they had stolen.
They were quite a bit so they dug a large hole along the river, placed the gold in a hole and rolled a large boulder into the hole.
They chipped a crude cross on top of the boulder and marked a large tree to help them locate it in the future.
The old man drew a map and gave it to grandpa and told him to do whatever he wanted to do with the gold.
Grandpa could not just pick up and go on such a trip. Roads were not that good and a team of horses and wagons was out of the question. So grandpa put the map up with other papers and it was more or less forgotten.
The family knew about the map but were all too young to do anything. My dad was the oldest, then there was Arlis, Paul, Wayne, Buford and Orne.
Grandpa died in 1936 and in going through the papers the map was rediscovered.
Arlis and Paul decided they would start getting things together and when they could manage it they would take a trip into the area and see what they could find.
They both worked at the Chevalet plant in St.Louis.
Paul was not married but Arlis was with a family. So it was a couple of years before the right time came.
They packed the car with food, heavy clothes and a cheap gun knowing there may be wild animals in the area.
They took off after work on Friday evening and drove to the general area along the river.
By then it was dark and they got a fire started. They were close to the fire warming up, talking, planning. When they noticed a ring of eyes reflected in the fire light, this shook them up pretty good.
They had the gun so they tied up the food, pulled down a sapling and tied the food to the top of the sapling then took off for the nearest large tree that had a vine to help them climb up.
They spent the night in the tree trying to stay awake.
During the night a large cat of some kind came yelling up to the area and the wolves just disappeared.
Knowing cats climbed trees they decided to shoot the gun at the cat.
The bullet went through the toe of one of their shoes but the cat did leave.
Morning came and they got the fire going again and had something to eat and started looking around.
Believe it or not they did find the boulder. They tried and tried to move it but it was too heavy and buried. They decided they would come back the next week with better tools and dynamite. They decided to stay the night and leave in the morning.
When they got home they learned about Pearl Harbor. We were at war.
Monday morning came and they went to work and Paul quit his job and went down and joined the Navy.
He just saw another adventure.
He crossed the Pacific nine times before he got to come home again.
When he was sixteen years old he packed a suitcase and headed west to be a cowboy.
The first winter he and another fellow were running fence on this huge range when they got caught in a bad snow storm.
They were lost, freezing and starving when they came upon an Indian village. The Indians were very nice to them, taking them in to warm and feeding them.
Paul said the food was very good, a kind of a stew.
After his first bowl he asked the chief if he could dip up a little more.
The chief said, Sure, just dig deep, the puppy's in the bottom.
Paul said things got better after that but when his suitcase and everything he owned was stolen he decided to come home besides he was homesick.
Paul stayed in the Navy several years so did not come back to Madison County for quite some time.
Arliss stayed in St. Louis, his wife divorced and later he married again and he and his new wife decided to resettle somewhere else.
He had always enjoyed hunting and fishing so they moved to Alaska.
He bought a boat and went in to commercial fishing.
Shortly after he got started a local merchant held his annual fishing tournament.
Rain or shine they fished for ocean fish.
Arliss joined in, had to signal the boats all left heading out for the deep.
Not long afterwards the weather bureau issued a bulletin that a very bad storm was forming in the area.
They should take note.
All of the fishermen talked it over and decided to come back and all but Arliss.
His boat did not have a radio so he did not get the message.
When the weather started to change he did come back in but by that time he had caught some fish so he won the tournament, his prize $1000 and a new boat motor.
Arliss and his wife stayed and made friends in Alaska, one couple especially.
One summer week they decided to go camping on an island in a large lake.
The only way to the island was by boat or plane.
They chartered a bush pilot and his plane to take them over.
The pilot first took the legacies and the one man over, then came back for Arliss and the provisions.
The plane took off and at about 200 or 300 feet lost flying speed and nosed over, hitting the water very hard.
Arliss was thrown out of the plane and was hurting badly in his chest.
The wing on one side was broken loose but was still attached to the fuselage.
The wingtip was dragging in the water and the engine idling so that the plane circled back around so that Arliss grabbed onto the float and hung on.
He could see that the pilot was dead.
By this time people on shore had boats out coming to help.
He was taken to the hospital where he stayed for quite a while.
Some time later a minister came through talking and praying with the patients.
He asked Arliss if he would like for him to pray with him.
Arliss said yes, his chest still hurt so bad he could hardly stand it.
Shortly after Arliss said the hurt started to leave.
A few more days and he went home.
He was so taken by these events that he decided to give his life over to the Lord.
He started a church to help the local Indians natives in the area who were very poor.
He started getting up food for them, got doctors to help.
He did this for several years and once Thanksgiving morning while loading his car with groceries to take to the Indians he had a heart attack and dropped over dead in the street.
During this time I had worked at the shoe factory, built a home in Oak Grove and started a family.
Wayne came back to Madison County and I sold him two acres of land next to me.
He bought an old school house and took it apart enough to haul it to the property and I helped him assemble it and make it livable.
He had inherited the map and made the decision to go find the gold if I would go with him.
So he, my younger brother Morris and I took off one Saturday morning all prepared we thought to be rich.
We wound up in the area but we could not find anything that was on the map.
We did discover a large opening in the bluff maybe forty feet over the river.
We climbed up where we could crawl into the hole and maybe eight feet into the hole there was another hole straight down.
Shining our lights down we could see about fifteen feet the floor of the cave.
It had a dirt floor, very smooth and back in the cave we could see stalagmites and stalactites.
Since we had no way to get down in the cave we decided to come back next weekend.
During the week I built up a rope ladder that would roll up and got some better lights.
The following weekend Wayne had to work so could not go but Morris and I decided we would go anyhow.
The next Saturday morning we loaded up some food, ladder lights, my automatic 22 pistol.
We found a place again and took a hatchet and cut a sapling to lay across the hole, tied the ladder on.
I went down first because I had the gun and we did not know but maybe it was full of snakes, just roof and floor gradually coming close together with stalagmites and stalactites everywhere.
We walked as far as possible and finally got down and crawled till we were afraid we would get stuck between the stalagmites.
There was still a large area further into the cave, close to where we came in the floor curled down and it was very smooth and some hair here and there.
We came back out and decided to come back home.
When we got to the car there was a man with a large rifle there.
He said he come to see what was going on.
We told him we just wanted to see the cave.
He said he and all the neighbors knew about the cave but pretty much stayed away from the area because it was a bear den.
We thanked him and headed home.
Later I quit the shoe factory and went to work for National Ed, a fellow I worked with and I played guitars together sometimes.
This Saturday morning we were in my living room playing and started to smell smoke.
Running out to look we saw Wayne's house is on fire.
It was blazing up too much to save.
It was a total.
The map was gone and I guess the gold is still buried on current river.
I've always liked caves and have been in quite a few.
One week I took my family to Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain's home and we went into the cave where Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher got lost.
I've also been 1,000 feet down in a working gold mine in Colorado.
My brother Morris was a happy-go-lucky devil-may-care guy and he and I the only ones left at home so we spent a lot of time together.
Our sister was married and lives south of Houston, Texas and still does.
Our brother Kurt joined the Air Force when he graduated from high school.
Morris and I took float trips during the summer and we talked a lot about different things.
Once Morris got to remembering school in St.
Louis his grade schooling was all up there and one of the boys was much bigger than Morris and was always picking on him.
So Morris made himself a promise that when he grew up he would hunt up Francis Fitzgerald and give him a good whippin'.
Dad, mom, and kids moved back to Fredericktown when I was 15 and Morris was about 11.
When Morris was 16 he went to work at the shoe factory and later had a car and thought he was pretty much grown up.
He got to thinking about Francis Fitzgerald and the promise he had made to himself.
So one nice Saturday morning he took off.
He knew where all the boys hung out, Buddha playground, had an indoor swimming pool and an athletic area, basketball court and so on and so forth.
Morris went into the building, the old man who took care of the things was still there.
Morris asked him if Francis Fitzgerald was still around.
He replied, yes, he is but you just missed him.
He left this morning going to Chicago to fight in the Golden Gloves boxing championships.
Morris decided on the way home he would just forgive Francis Fitzgerald.
Morris always liked guns and was a very good marksman, however he was a little careless.
He accidentally shot himself twice.
The first time he was at the river about three miles from home with a homemade pistol made from a .22 rifle made by cutting the barrel and the stock off.
The gun was stuck into his belt and when he leaned over to look at something the gun fell out and hit something on the ground and went off.
He was shot through the shoulder, he pushed the rag into the hole and walked home.
The doctor said the bullet had only missed his heart by an inch.
The second time he had a little pocket derringer double barrel gun and was at the city lake when a large bird flew over.
He fired at it and someone hollered at him.
He put the gun in his hip pocket forgetting he had re-cocked it.
It went off and put a nice crease in his bottom.
For several weeks he could not sit down or sleep on his back.
When the National Guard Armory was built in town, Marsh joined the guards.
They went on maneuvers every year and this year they went to Wisconsin to learn to shoot machine guns.
The men took turns shooting at moving tanks.
Most of the men were missing the tank, but when Marsh's turn came he knew when you shoot at moving targets you had to lead it and the faster it moved or the farther away it was from you the more you lead.
The tanks had a very long gun barrel sticking out of the front, so every tank that came by Marsh placed the gun sights on the tip of the barrel and shot.
About every bullet was hitting the turret.
General Mark Clark was on the base at that time and was made aware of Marsh's shooting so he came over to watch.
After a while he says to Marsh, �That�s pretty good shooting son, where are you from?
� Marsh says, �Southeast Missouri sir.
� The general asks, �Are there any more like you down there?
� Marsh answered, �Yes sir.
� The woods is full of them sir.
The general ran and said, �Well that�s pretty good shooting son.
� The Bailey�s and the Chaunces were both musically inclined, so were generally playing somewhere every weekend.
A cousin showed me some simple cards on a guitar when I was five years old and I stuck with it from then on.
In 1960 I was working at Monsanto World Headquarters and Research Center in St.
Louis County and had several patents to my name.
I designed and built a new music instrument for my own enjoyment.
It had an aluminum frame with a harpsichord type keyboard.
It had six sets of mandolin keys for tuning and eight sets of electric guitar strings.
I built four magnetic microphones to couple the strings to the amplifier.
It had no sound board so it had to be plugged into an amplifier.
The idea was for it to sound somewhat like an electric guitar.
My daughter Connie played the melody and bass parts of a song and I filled in the middle with carding.
A disc of the music is at the library.
I called the instrument a gitana.
In 1985 I built my first homemade guitar.
At the same time I got a new four channel tape recorder which lets me record four tracks one at a time then combine them into stereo.
A disc is at the library.
During the time I worked at Monsanto I built a fiberglass bided sports car which took a second place at a custom auto show at the Arena in St.
Louis.
I also built a gyrocopter and flew it.
A gyrocopter is a forerunner of the helicopter.
It cannot jump straight up but it flies at a very low speed.
It looks like a helicopter.
I've generally invented something at every place I have worked.
I retired from the cat factory and had invented a few things for them.
Before I moved to St.
Louis I designed and built a speedboat and used it on the City Lake.
I designed and built the three-story elevator in the Sunderman building including the cat controls.
It is very hard to tell a story without sounding like bragging.
I don't like to brag but I guess I will.
My grandpa and grandma Lachance lived in the Minel Mot area.
Grandpa worked in the lead mines and was not very old when he died.
His nickname was Squirrelly Lachance.
Back in earlier years hunting was a big part in living and he was a crack shot with a rifle.
I was about 11 when he died and his youngest son was 10.
Grandma remarried about three years later to a farmer and James had to help on the farm.
Farming is hard work and James became very muscular.
He did not care for farm work so when he was 15 he ran away and joined the army.
When grandma found out where he was she had him kicked out.
When he became older he rejoined and he became an experienced in communications and was stationed in Alaska.
James' older brother Harold, also called Squirrelly, worked in the mines and later had a tavern in Minel Mot.
He played the guitar with a friend who played a mandolin for parties and picnics and such.
His hobby was bare knuckle prize fighting and he made extra money at it.
When I was young I did my share of hunting, fishing, but when I got older I would rather see and watch the animals.
I would not shoot anything now unless it was a problem, a threat.
So last fall I was burning trash in my trash barrel.
I always stay with it till it is out when I noticed two rabbits about 40 feet away in front of a large clematis bush watching me.
I knew rabbits were living in there so I just watched them and they were not moving.
So I started talking to them in a low voice telling them how pretty they were and not to be afraid.
They did not move so I wondered how close I could get before they moved.
I started moving slowly still talking to them and they still just stood there watching me.
Pretty soon I was close enough to see why they did not move.
There were two clumps of dried grass my lawnmower had kicked out.
I still like guns and have several, including a little .410 shotgun that belonged to my mother.
She shot squirrels when she wanted to make some good old squirrel gravy.
I also have a Model 1873 Springfield Army Rifle hanging over my fireplace.
He told me that when a number of Polish people emigrated to St.
Louis they were treated very poorly so they formed a militia.
They had drills, marched, and had a hall where they had regular meetings.
They called themselves the Polish Falcons but disbanded later when things got much better.
I asked him about the guns and he said they were taken by members but except one which was broken up and parts missing.
The next day he brought the gun into work and gave it to me.
The stock was broken and the hammer was gone.
I repaired it and from a gun shop bought a hammer for another rifle which I could cut and weld and rebuild to fit the gun.
It is quite presentable.
I have a picture of the Indian Chief Geronimo holding the same model gun.
There was 700,000 built for the army.
It was a trapdoor gun of .4570 caliber.
Its name was Hank Podolsky.
Monsanto had a policy at that time of bringing promising young men from other countries to the research center and let them work at the place while they trained them for communicative positions back in their home country in a Monsanto facility.
I got to know most of them because I was in instrumentation and was helping to design control instruments they used.
I wanted to get them to know more common Americans like me and my family so I would invite them one at a time with their wife to have a Sunday dinner with us.
I also knew that my children would learn from meeting and talking to people of other lands.
It was a real eye-opener.
We had people from Poland, Mexico, Israel, China, Japan, Arabia, and France that I remember.
Hank and Josephine became special friends as did Luis Enrico Lopez who played twin guitars most beautifully.
There was Samuel and Yael Barzekai from Israel who became special and we brought them down to Freddy Town for a weekend to meet my parents.
The couples from China were especially attractive and we enjoyed them a lot.
I think we were all awarded by this experience.
At the time my son Donald was in the second grade and my wife and I received a call from his school requesting a meeting, nothing wrong, just something to discuss.
They said that because Donald was such an outstanding student and because of his personality and ability to interact with everyone, they wanted our permission to have him a psychiatrist to examine him and have a brain scan to see if they learned something.
They concluded that it was heredity and environment at home.
This was written up in a medical journal.
Thank you Donald.
Love you.
The September 2018 issue of the Democrat News had a very good article about Donald and his work in aerospace, his work with satellites and rocketry.
The other two children were not exactly slouches.
Connie was an excellent student and was especially good in music.
She at a very early age started playing music with me and became my special buddy.
To begin with she played an old fashioned pump organ, later I got her a keyboard and then the katana, Vicki Darlene, was second daughter, was born four years later on Connie's birthday.
She graduated from high school second out of a class of 600.
She was an announcer at a radio station in St.
Louis.
She developed cancer when she was 36 years old and we lost her.
My wife and I were both 20 years old when we married and were married over 70 years.
We had one grandchild from Connie and Larry and she has carried on the tradition of excellence and education.
Plus one more remarkable attribute, last September 2018 she made me a great great grandpa by having two beautiful twin boys.
Thank you Diana and Brian.
I think I'll get back to 1965 when my brother came in to visit me and we drove over to the local airport and I saw my first radio controlled model airplane.
Up to that time I didn't know they existed.
We decided we'd find out about it.
The operator was in the Air Force and his had been to Germany where he found this radio control and bought it $600.
I didn't think I could stand that so I came back home and started figuring out how to build my own.
I bought a cheap set of walkie talkies from Allied Radio and took the parts and arranged them in such a way that I could use one transmitter to send a signal to the other one and cause an airplane to turn right or left or neutral.
And this is the way I got started in model airplanes.
And I did not stop until last fall when I started getting where it was more difficult to do everything and I got out of it.
At that time I had 40 airplanes.
The biggest one I had was 12 foot wingspan motor glider.
I gave most of them to fellas in our club.
I still have several special ones that I kept that I've got in the basement that I look at now and then.
I still fly radio control drones now and then, little ones in my living room, keep my hand in it.
My brother Kurt graduated from the Frederictown High School and went up and joined the Air Force.
After basic training he was sent to Schenectady, New York to the General Electric School and when he got out of there he came back and went into a special job that had just opened up.
The Air Force was starting a new project and was called the 101st Command of Radio Control Bombers.
What they were doing was setting off atomic bomb blasts on Kwajalein Islands and flying the bombers through the cloud to collect samples for analyzing.
Kurt's job was in the installation of radio control into the bombers and the maintenance of them.
The bombers had to be landed on another island for several months to let the rain wash them down before they were safe to work on.
When this program was ended Kurt was sent to Germany to help set up some missile bases over there and he tells me he lived in a German castle with the other guys while this was being done.
When this project was more or less finished he was put into special services of rocketry and he ended up his job was over quality control of the guidance systems of the rockets and satellites.
In 1958 I took my family to Florida where he was stationed at the time and he took us through the facility at Cape Canaveral to show us some of the things that was being done.
At that time they had a moon lander behind Glast all ready to put on top of a rocket and to launch.
It was all clad in gold foil.
Kurt said I have a secret I'm going to tell you.
He said the other night he was making final check on the guidance systems and while he was in there he went behind and put his hand print on the back leg of the moon lander.
He says the oils will evaporate in outer space but my hand print is going to the moon.
Kurt was friends with all the original astronauts.
They treated him special after all if on the way to the moon you lose guidance system you could be in a heap of trouble.
Kurt retired from the Air Force after 22 years.
He was only 53 years old when he passed away, radioactive poisoning I think.
I can't tell you much about my sister June.
She was always so cute, so well behaved and lovable that I don't know anything to tell.
She was a hard worker who did her help, share for the family and I love her.
She has a nice family and lives south of Houston Texas.
Sadly her home was badly damaged by the last hurricane and she and her son Steve have had to live in a trailer since then.
My youngest brother Dale was born when I was about 18 years old so he was 18 years younger than me and I got married when I was 20 so I was not around him very much.
I know he joined the Air Force after school, became an expert in communications and was sent to Alaska.
He lives in Washington State, close to Seattle now.
We keep in touch.
He had a good sense of humor and a wonderful family.
Other things I have done.
I was president of the Oak Grove School Board in the 50s, auto mechanic at the Spain's Christ supplement dealership, manager of a sandblasting operation.
We blasted large beams for buildings then left them outside to rust.
The rust left them a pretty color and protected them from the deterioration.
I worked at Bennett Smith repairing farm equipment and painting.
Then there was Sundermans Furniture and Appliance.
I repaired washers, dryers, refrigeration and furniture.
As I mentioned I retired from the cat factory at Fairbletown.
I had a lot of good friends there.
It was a good place to work for me.
A couple of years before I retired, just before New Year's, some of the ladies were standing by a machine relaxing at break time when I came by to look at the machine.
One lady says to me, what kind of resolutions do you plan to make for New Year's?
I told her I would not be making any because I didn't know anything that I wanted to change.
Of course they all laughed.
And one lady said, not even being conceited?
We all laughed.
We knew it was all in fun.
And I said, Ann, I'm glad you brought that up.
Let's analyze what it means to be conceited.
I obviously like myself, because I like my life, what I've done with it, all the friends I've made, and because of these things I believe I have a good future.
Isn't that better than the opposite?
I think you ladies should think about being a little more conceited.
That put a whole new light on things.
For the first time in sixty plus years I could see my true self, of course, which I am, is really mostly because of my parents, and loving Christian home they provided for me and my siblings.
They did not believe that severe punishment was necessary for us.
Some knuckles on our head was generally enough to get our attention.
I don't ever remember dad whipping any of us kids.
I take after my dad physically.
We both were tall and thin.
When dad turned about eighty, he started putting on weight, and the doctor put him on a diet, but he kept gaining weight, watching and found he was faithfully following his diet, but was still eating his regular meals too.
I also have put on weight in my old age.
My first pre-induction call for the Army in 1944, I weighed one hundred and eight pounds.
I did not pass.
I now am about the same height, five-eleven, and weigh about one hundred and sixty pounds.
After dad died, I took care of mom, and she still lived at home until she had a stroke at ninety-five.
She was one hundred and one when she died.
On her one hundredth birthday, a local reporter asked her if she had a secret for her longevity.
She said, sure do, just don't die.
I took her to the doctor for checkups regularly, and on one visit a friend from the shoe factory asked me if I thought she knew him.
I said, I doubt it, sometimes she doesn't even know me.
She looked up and said, oh, I know you all right, I just don't want to admit it sometimes.
Then she laughed, she was just kidding.
Before moving back to Fredericktown from St.
Louis, my grandpa cut the logs, then he and my dad built a one-room log cabin, and we moved into it while the main house was being built.
There was mom, dad, and four kids living in it.
There was a creek forty feet in front of the cabin, and a spring on a neighbor's place about a quarter mile up the hill.
One nice Saturday, the church came with food and tools and had a big picnic.
Then the men had an old-fashioned house raising.
Dad and I had already put in a foundation using a homemade concrete mixer made from a fifty-five gallon oil drum with a Briggs & Stratton gas engine off of a Maytag washing machine.
I helped dad finish the house and learned enough so that when I started to think about getting married, I started building a house in 1944.
My sweetheart and I both worked at the shoe factory, and we pooled our money and the house was finished, but it was not finished, but it was good enough that when we married in October 3rd, 1947, we moved in.
There was still work to do, but never had to pay rent.
Our EA Electric was not available yet in the area, but I knew sooner or later they would be, so I wired the house as I finished it.
In those days, our EA had a policy that they had their own inspectors to inspect the house before hooking on to it.
So when the time came, the men came over to inspect.
I already had the book of rules and followed them.
One rule was no acid in soldering, rosin coarse solder only.
So when I soldered the joints, I did not use a soldering iron, but used a torch to heat the wire up enough so that when the solder touched to the wire, it melted and ran into the joint.
It made a really good joint.
I also took extra effort in the breaker box.
I left the pigtails extra long and coiled them up around a dowel so they appeared very tidy.
The inspector came and unwrapped the tape from a joint and said, oh, this will never do.
You can't use acid on the joints.
I said, it's not acid, it's rosin core.
So he took his finger and put it to the joint and then tasted it and said, well, I'll be doggone, I never saw anything like this before.
He finished inspecting and said, I've been inspecting for REA these many years and this is absolutely the best job I have ever seen.
I wish he hadn't said it, I couldn't wear my hat for a week.
I tell you what, I've had about enough of this bragging, I think I will sign off.
I do have a few rules for me that I try to follow.
Number one, do anything you can to make yourself happy as long as you don't hurt anyone, especially yourself.
Think of conservation, don't do anything today that you can put off until tomorrow.
I have a checkup every six months or so and for the last three or four years after test results are in, my doctor tells me, whatever you're doing, keep doing it.
I have some deterioration of my body, but mainly I'm pretty healthy.
I don't think I worry about death, I'm an optimist and if I die next week I just have to learn to live with it.
I hope you all have a good future and God Bless. you