Chapter 28 Michigan and Arizona THIS BOOK had its beginnings in a tree-fringed, lake-bordered rural farming community in Michigan, where I grew into long pants during the teen years of the 20th century. It will end in Helen’s home state of Arizona. Two areas of America could not be more different. But that is the […]

Chapter 27 Why Life Begins at 80by Helen E. Line This article appeared in the July /August issue of New Life News There are essentially very good reasons for making the 1 statement that “Life Begins at 80.” As on who has reached that age, I can speak with some authority. We 80-year-olds have left […]

Chapter 26 Three Generations Carry the Torch WHEN THE Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles in 1932 Helen and I went from our Ontario, California home to see the climax of the Olympic marathon as the runners entered the Los Angeles Coliseum. Fifty-four years later, in 1984, Los Angeles again hosted this great international […]

Chapter 25The Tale of a Tux DESPITE ALL the tragedies of the Vietnam conflict, this is the story of a blessing that resulted from that decade of fighting—or, rather, many dozens of blessings. When South Vietnamese evacuees were flown out of their land, hundreds of them were settled in tent encampments on the northern fringes […]

PART IV The Great Depression and some Greater Memories Chapter 24The Great Depression YOUNG PEOPLE of today—even those of middle-age— 1 have almost no conception of what conditions existed in America during the years of THE GREAT DEPRESSION. Those words have to be put in stark capital letters. They express the enormity of despair which […]

Chapter 23 Tornado Watch Blow By Blow In a Windstorm MEMORIAL DAY, 1977 was well named! It is impressed in our memories forever. Driving back home to California from my 55th high school reunion in Michigan, Helen and I were wakened in our motel in eastern Kansas by a roar of rain. Two-and-a-half inches pounded […]

Chapter 22De Vaca and Estaban CABAZA DE VACA is a person whose life and legacy should be known by every school boy and girl in the United States. Instead, at least until recent years, this does not seem to have been the case. Helen and I were married and had two children before we learned […]

Chapter 21 Life in the Old West HELEN LINE was born in the West. Not only is she a west- erner by birth; she has lived in the western spirit. How many persons had a 400-square-mile Western cattle ranch as a childhood playground? That’s 20 miles, in any direction. How many persons today had a […]

Chapter 20 The Four Corners A Navajo Squaw Dance and a Four-day Sing THE FOLLOWING letter, written in 1955 to our daughter at home in California, describes a week filled with intense interest, in a remote corner of the Navajo Reservation. Dear Adrienne, Last night we realized one of our minor ambitions that I, at […]

Chapter 19 Kayenta Mail RunAccepted for publication by Arizona Highways magazineJanuary, 1991 issue LEE BRADLEY, Navajo Indian, was inconspicuous in the mid-1950s crowd of nearly a hundred westerners who waited before the post office and trading post at Kayenta, Arizona. Inconspicuous too was a sign in small print, with its incorrectly spelled word: “United States […]