My Personal Saga

After growing up as an Army brat, it was very hard for me, at thirteen, to adjust to life in Linden, a small east-Texas town where Daddy found work when he retired from the Army. “Massive culture shock” was how I described that experience to Bernie on our first date a few years later. Part I of my memoir describes a few of the challenges I encountered on arrival in Linden. No need to repeat that here.

I entered the Linden-Kildare Consolidated Independent School District half-way through eighth grade — and it was my eighth school. All I could see was how different — and clearly inferior — it was compared to the superb Gunston Jr. High that I’d attended for three semesters in Arlington, Virginia.

▲ This 1963 photo shows me holding two Purple Martin nestlings who had fallen out of a special “Martin box” that Daddy had built for them in our yard. As he went for a ladder to put them back, Mama’s camera caught me in the act of keeping them safe from the cats prowling the neighbhood.

▲ Mama took this photo of me in the spring of 1964, at home in Linden but about to leave to give a solo piano-violin recital in Texarkana, Texas.

The woman who taught me both piano and violin lived in Texarkana (about an hour to the north), so for years Mama and I spent Saturdays there. She had a good following in her town, and many locals  would attend as well as some friends driving up from Linden to support me.

But classical piano and violin weren’t “big” in Linden, where most musically inclined kids played in the school band and marched at football games.

So as usual — both then and forever after — I chose to go my own way.