I grew up in the middle of my family’s small restaurant/gas station on Highway 301 a couple miles north of Waldo, FL. As a young child, there was always new activity to take in and process. Waiting on tables and pumping gas as well as working on our farm was part of my growing-up experience. I did my homework sitting at one of the restaurant’s four tables. And from my time working in the restaurant and filling station, I watched humanity “come and go.” Particularly, the resta

In 1951, a film entitled “Duck and Cover” was released and shown to school children all over the United States. Because the Soviet Union detonated their first nuclear device the year before, the U.S. government wanted to prepare the population for a nuclear attack. Thus, the duck and cover campaign was born. Shelters were built, drills were held in towns and schools, and the film was shown to all schoolchildren. And as a young child, I found all of this disconcerting. W

As Father’s Day draws near, I’ve been thinking of my dad and how I was lucky to be his son. Dad was born in 1897 - yes, that’s eighteen ninety-seven - and he was 50 years old when I was born. As a young man, he served in the Navy during World War I and was in his prime during the Great Depression. In the early 1940’s he married my mother, who was 24 years younger than he. Together they would experience the government sanctioned rationing of gas, sugar and other commodities th

As I was beginning in my business career, I owned and operated an auto auction business in Albany, GA. I had worked a couple years in the auto auction business in Palatka, FL and now that I had ventured out on my own, I loved being my own boss. It was now was all up to me to run the business and its success depended on the decisions I made and the people I employed to assist me in the operations. I worked hard, long hours. Frankly, that didn’t bother me at all. I was young, w