Midnight soon replaced Blackie. He
turned out to be a smart dog. I trained him to go out and get the
paper every morning. That worked great. For awhile. Then, he began
gathering up all the papers in the neighborhood, and tearing all of
them up in our yard.
In a moment of weakness, Barbara
and I let the kids talk us into buying a long-haired Lsaha Apso
puppy. Goldie sure was pretty, but there was really nobody in our
family prepared to properly care for a dog like that.
When Goldie got away from one of
us, Midnight would chase her down, and hold her with his paw until we
could get there.
Corey was large for his age. In
5th grade basketball, he dominated. In one game, his team
was ahead, 12-2. Corey had 14 points.
When he drove to the wrong goal,
Barbara was keeping the clock. When our screams to turn around went
unheard, Barb was reaching for the buzzer. I had to grab her hand.
She was about to cause a lot of trouble. Corey got in the habit of
not jumping to rebound. That habit persisted when he was older, a big
negative, because now the other guys had caught up with him in size.
A photography studio was for sale
in Arkadelphia. We bought it, and prepared to move. Then we both were
hit by buyer's remorse. Especially me.Could we do this? Could I find
a job? Could we feed our babies in the meantime?
I drove down once to make
arrangements in my old truck. On the way back, I saw a truck hit a
deer. The deer was dead, the truck went on, so I picked it up and
threw it in the back of my truck. When I got home, I dressed it and
froze most of it. We were eating venison that night, and the doorbell
rang. Kinley's eyes got real big, and she said, “Will they be able
to tell that we're eating runned' over deer?”
Someone asked me later, “Do you deer
hunt?” I replied, “No, but I do enjoy a good roadkill every now
and then.”. She said “Oh.” and moved a little farther away.
When we got to Arkadelphia, we
realized the studio was about to go under. We started taking every
photography job we could find. Some photographer told her,
photographing dog shows can be really profitable. We located an
upcoming dog show nearby, and were given the job on a commission
basis. Well, as it turned out, this dog show didn't include show
dogs, just your average hound dogs and such. We sat there all day and
never snapped a shot! The good side of it was, we didn't owe one
penny in commission. From that day forward, every time a job flopped,
we called it a “Dog show.”
Corey had thrown a no hitter last
year in Baseball, and I was anxious to get him into the program here
in Arkadelphia. I called the league director. "No," he
said, "We've already had the draft" We argued about it a
while, but he stood his ground. Corey had to set out a year, and he
never got back to where he was in baseball. I thought about calling
my lawyer friend in McCrory, seeing if he could throw a scare into
the director. I should have. But I guess I was a little pre-occupied
with where our next meal was coming from, at that time.
Things were going bad. I searched
everywhere for a teaching job. I lost 30 pounds. A man with kids to
feed and no job is a sorry sight to behold. The first photography job
I personally landed was taking group pictures at the HSU band camp,
printing black and whites all night in the darkroom, and selling
them at the final concert. It turned out good, and helped us get
through the summer. Corey, going into the 8th grade,
helped me sell. When the concert was over, I told him, ”We made a
killing today!” He replied, with deep concern, “Are we rich now?”
I had been too busy to notice how much our financial problems had
affected our children. Now, 30 years later, I still do that job every
summer. It's the only photography job we still do. It saved us. I
guess I am too emotionally attached to it to ever quit it.
I will always feel indebted to Wendell
Evanson, the legendary band director at HSU from that time period,
for giving me that job. He never knew he saved us.
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