Too Many Eggs in the Basket

The Goats in Spain did not stay mainly on the plain

                   
I don't know how many people have told me that as you go through life you tend to only remember the good parts.  Somehow you are supposed to forget the struggles, the disappointments and all the problems and only remember the happy times.  When school started in the fall of 1977 it seemed like smooth sailing to my graduation from college but there were a lot of stumbling blocks along the way.

By October the Boys and I were settled back into school.  Enrolled in eighteen hours of some really tough classes like pathophysiology, cell biology, zoology and quantitative analysis meant my sleeping time was reduced to three to five hours a night. No problem with that as I had always thought that sleep was a waste of time and going to class everyday was a requirement.  The problem arose when Dennis announced we had to go to Spain in a Ford trip. There was no "not going" because of school and in reality how could someone pass up a trip to Spain for seven days.

The view from our hotel

                                      
                   

Dennis's Mother came down to take care of the boys and off we went to the sun-soaked Costa del Sol.  Too bad it was a tinge off season and the weather was slightly cool and sometimes rainy. There were five hundred people on the trip that Dennis, as a host, had to make sure had a good time.  It was an interesting feat to try to take care of some of these people.  One man from Tulsa filled his suitcase with food as he was afraid to eat anything in Spain while another man brought his wife who was dying of cancer and then there was the assortment of people who were never happy anywhere at any time. Need I say there was never a dull moment.

                   
Actually I had a great time touring Granada, the Alhambra, loved all the Moorish architecture, the Cathedrals and the food.  One day we took the ferry to Morocco across the Strait of Gibraltar which was an interesting trip complete with me getting to ride a camel. It was really a fun trip until it came time for us to leave.  Seems like there was a strike at the airport and no planes could take off.  That was a huge problem as we had to vacate the hotel since another group of Ford people were on their way.  

Granada

                                                    

Somehow the tour company came up with an interesting solution.  Four Hundred and ninety-eight people were loaded onto buses and two into an ambulance for a trip across Spain.  There was something very nice about going through the countryside filled with olive orchards and beautiful scenery to the Portuguese border.  The border was a small river that we crossed on a wooden flat-bottomed platform a few people at a time.  Then it was back on more buses and off to Faro, Portugal where we met the Ford group that was just arriving.  We got on their plane only to be taken to Lisbon for twelve hours since the flight crew was out of flying hours.  We finally arrived home after a fourteen hour flight and two days late. The trip was fun, at least for me, not so much for Dennis as usual.  Since I had filled my suitcase with a couple of text books the extra travel time created some study time.

                                                   Touring the Spanish countryside

Christmas came and went.  Wes always hated the artificial tree decorated with red velvet bows and apples.  But in the picture I can't seem to remember if they were amazed at the amount of presents or disappointed. When the semester, hopefully my last, started I found out they were not offering the Botany class I needed to take. My adviser let me take three hours of graduate research instead.  This actually was his master plan to get out of teaching Zoology labs himself and have me do biological research by ripping the sciatic nerves out of live mice resulting in their death. Nice that I had just taken Zoology the semester before so it was fresh in my mind - not so nice killing the little mice.

As if trying to finish my last semester of school wasn't a chore in itself with the extra hours added on from teaching and research the home front got more complicated.  Dennis spent a couple of days in the hospital when his blood pressure went to 240/140, he decided he did not like the 37' Ford he dragged home and traded it for a table saw, another Ford trip popped for the month of June and he found out that he was being transferred to Kansas City.  Even though Dennis thought I could snap my fingers and make everything perfect I had to take one event at a time.

I finished up the semester in great shape.  Somehow I managed a composite average of 3.65 for the fifty-tw0 hours of math and science which was pretty unbelievable to me.  I graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree with a double major in Biology and Chemistry.  With all the college classes I had taken at the three previous schools I could have also had a degree in Liberal Arts with only three more hours in art but I just wanted to be done.  Graduation Night was a pretty proud moment and I no longer had to hear how Dennis never thought he would have to put his wife through college.

After graduation I spent two weeks getting the house looking spectacular, put it on the market For Sale By Owner and held an open house on Memorial Day. It was an absolutely beautiful day and I guess people don't have anything to do on that day so we were flooded with lookers all day.  I don't know if it was the smell of the fresh baked cookies in the house or the sparkling pool in the backyard but I had nine people on a list that wanted to purchase the house.  I kept a list just in case a potential buyer backed out or could not qualify.  Remember how a year before I balked at buying a house for $50.000.00?  Well, I sold the eight year old house we paid $20,000.00 for with an added $8,000.00 swimming pool for $45,000.00.  Plus because I sold it myself Ford gave us 10% of the selling price as a bonus for not having to fool with it.  Not too bad.

In between selling the house and the trip to Freeport in the Bahamas it was time to find a place to live in Kansas City. Dennis had been looking since he went to work there the first of June and I had to fly up to see what he had found.  Actually I was ecstatic to be moving.  I was sad to be leaving the pool since we had not even had a full summer to enjoy it but the thought of leaving the Dallas/Fort Worth area and all the unpleasant memories that the area brought to mind was sheer happiness. My Dad had grown up in Kansas, went to the University in Lawrence and worked in downtown Kansas City when he graduated from college in the 1920's. Uncle Tom had grown up there and told me many stories.

The actual looking for a house was a nightmare.  The real estate agent kept driving me by shopping centers in the suburbs and possible schools in areas where they were building new houses. If the economy depended on me spending time at shopping centers it was out of luck and who says the shiny new school is the best.  Dennis was looking for the palace befitting a company junior executive while I was looking for the old house with the flowers and white picket fence. All was becoming pretty bleak and I began to wonder why I was even included in the house hunt.

While sitting in the motel room one day waiting for Dennis or the real estate agent I used the time to read the telephone book.  Reading the telephone book had become a habit of mine in travelling as you can learn a lot about a place and the people who live there.  Just by chance I came across something that took my breathe away and maybe my heart even stopped beating.  Suddenly Kansas City and any old house would do.

Turning Thirty Was Great

Watching a program the other day I learned that it was forty years ago that the movie Saturday Night Fever made it's debut. Gads where did all the years fly by to?  It did make me curious about the 70's since I am writing about that period of time so I did a little research to jog the old memory as to the events.  I turned thirty in 1976 and a friend much older than I told me I would have more fun in my thirties than any other decade.  She was wrong as I have had more fun each decade since.  

Way back when I started writing these stories for lack of anything else to write about at the time I did a story on the fact that I have horrible hair.  With the advent of going back to college, the kids, the race car, and all the other things I crammed into a day I resorted to an Afro Style of stupid curls.  I have avoided posting any pictures as I looked so bad a cat would have not dragged me home. Okay, if you really want a laugh it is in a story from 7/24/15.  But two things happened in the mid-seventies to save the world from looking at it.  One - Farah Fawcett was quite popular with her Shag haircut and Two - I spent less time with racing so there was time to fool with blow dryers and hot rollers. I did not end up looking like Farah but it was an improvement.

So, what did we do when all of a sudden the race car was gone that we had poured every thought, every extra penny, every vacation and was the center of all of our friends for ten years?   Must say that for me, although I resented the reasons and the way it happened, it took one form of stress out of my life. I had plenty to do with college, the boys and my little business.  Not so true for Dennis.

A few months after school started in the fall of 1976 Dennis decided we needed a bigger house.  More fitting I guess to him feeling like a Junior Executive with Ford Motor Company. When we bought the "starter" home in Carrollton in 1970 it was twenty thousand dollars and it was your basic three bedroom, bath and a half, living room and family room house. It was also five minutes for Dennis to get to work.  I had no problems with the house and Wes was happy in the first grade at a school two blocks away plus the field in front of our house was where Wes played soccer.  After months of looking at fifty thousand dollar houses that were not much bigger, farther from work and school and only offered few more amenities we decided to stay where we were.

Mother had a pretty bad couple of years after George passed away and I didn't really have much time to spend with her in the racing days.  She had come down to visit once and had Dr. Chandler get rid of the extra tissue (called bags) around her eyes right after I had met him.  In the spring of 77' she came down to get a facelift.  That was pretty interesting as she was really a pretty woman but no one argued with Mother.  Then she started jogging much to my dismay.  I hate jogging but every time she arrived I had to purchase new running shoes as I always managed to get paint or something on the previous ones.  I had to have been the perfect daughter as I did go out and run three miles every morning with her on her visits.  It was a blessing that after all the cosmetic surgery and the fitness craze that she had gained lots of boyfriends and was too busy to visit very often especially since Dennis and Mother were like putting a match to a puddle of gasoline. 

My brother, Kenny, and his wife and girls came down in the spring for a classic car show in Arlington.  Kenny had been building old cars since he was twelve and had a really cool old truck to put in the show.  What a fun weekend that was.  There were lots of neat old cars and lots of contests for the people who came like races for the kids and silly things for the adults.  I entered a spark plug changing contest where they provided wrenches but Kenny had a speed wrench in his truck that I used instead of the ones provided.  An old drag racing trick won the contest for me.

Two things happened after Kenny's visit.  The light bulb went off in Dennis's head and he decided we needed a street rod. Working for Ford and going to a lot of dealerships he came across a lot of old cars in old dealerships and pastures.  One weekend we borrowed a trailer and went to Vernon, Texas to drag home a real "project" car in the form of a 1937 Ford. The kids and I thought it was pretty cool and it would definetly give Dennis something to do.

The second idea came when Kenny took a dip in our pool.  Kinda small.

Since the pool was a little small we decided to build a bigger one.  I vetoed going to summer school that summer because summer school was really tough going everyday and I needed to be home to watch over the construction.  It seemed like it took the entire summer to get finished but the kids were about as happy with the piles of sand as they were when the pool was finally done.

Wes took swimming lessons and we bought Wally a ski vest that we kept by the backdoor.  He learned he had to put it on every time he went out the door even if it was just to play in the yard.  The dog, Boodles, which was the longest resident dog we had, was a problem.  She was an English Bulldog, Dennis's choice and certainly not mine, and sunk like a rock every time she fell in the pool.  If I had been able to be cruel to an animal I would not have jumped into the pool fully dressed on a regular basis to save that dog. Must admit there were times I thought about it.

When school started in the fall I found out that if I took an extra class each semester that I would be able to graduate in the spring of 1978.
That sounded great as I was ready to get all that over with.  Since we no longer needed a nine passenger van to tow a race car with I got a 78' black Mustang 5-speed with T-tops to drive back and forth to school.
Now that was a cool car to drive while the radio blasted with the Bees Gees, Elton John or the one the kids hated, Barry Manilow. Poor Wally learned to hate Disco and Barry Manilow at the age of three.

The pool got finished in time for Wes's seventh birthday party and I must say I loved having the pool. The last two semesters started off quite nicely and as I look back now I can see that at turning thirty a change in attitude began to happen.  Was it going back to college, rocking out to the disco music, having more fun with the cute little boys or actually gaining a little maturity?  Perhaps it was a combination of all of those things. Whatever it was helped prepare me to handle all the events of the coming year.

One of the Best and the Worst Years

There are times when writing these stories that it is difficult not only to remember everything but also to convey how hard it was to juggle the boys, college, the house, the race car and a husband who nothing seemed to make him happy.  It was an odd coincidence last Sunday while attending a concert of the SWOSU Music Department that sort of brought it all back. There was a girl somewhere in her twenties playing a flute while a small child slept on her chest in one of those papoose carriers.  I was extremely proud of that girl even though many probably did not feel the same way.

I can remember back then telling friends who questioned how I went back to college, ran a small business, took care of the boys and tried to be the perfect wife that I wished I was the kind of mother who enjoyed staying and baking bread.  Life would have been a lot easier although I knew that just wasn't me. In truth, looking back now, I wonder how I survived 1976.

When racing season started in the spring Wes was a very active 5 1/2 year old. He operated at high speed from morning until night, racing up and down the street on a Big Wheel or bicycle with a vivid imagination and non-stop talking.  Wally was 2 1/2 always happy and I think rather quiet trying to take in all the commotion around him.  We spent a lot of time together on the drive to Denton to college everyday and I think he enjoyed the quiet without his brother and the children his same age at the TWU Child Care Center.

I loved going to school but I think I loved going to school from the age of six. Something in my personality requires me to never go to class without being prepared as I never wanted  to appear stupid.  That probably comes from being told too many times that I was stupid and maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. When Dr. Chandler, the plastic surgeon and my cheerleader on going back to college, would demand to see my grades at the end of each semester it was fun to show them off.
At the end of three semesters of Chemistry, Math and Biology I had managed not the 4.0 he said I needed but a 3.5 grade average I was really proud of.

The weekends leading up to the first drag race in March were a flurry of activity in getting the car painted and ready to go. Watus, his girlfriend Sam, Jimmy Parker and Dennis and I all got along well together but privately I had to put up with constant complaints from Dennis about this or that.  The first race at La Place in New Orleans I could not go due to an art show and it ended up with Jimmy Parker departing from the team.  Watus bought Jimmy's engine and a friend of Watus's, Bill Burns started helping on the car. Bill and his wife, Pam, were a great help and fun to be around.  Since Dennis knew very little about blown Chrysler engines and Watus was driving we needed Bill and his expertise.

My Ford lease vehicle for that year was a nine passenger van which doubled as a tow vehicle for the race car.  Many weekends all six adults and sometimes my two boys ran down the highway going to places like Carlise, Arkansas, Jackson, Mississippi, Houma, Louisiana, Houston, Tulsa or Amarillo.  Every race had it's funny stories and memorable events.  It must have been bad luck to make reservations at motels in advance but it was at times difficult to find rooms at midnight after driving half the night and racing all day. Then there was the time Dennis backed the van over the front of a Corvette.  Or the night Dennis and I left Dallas after a company party we had to attend and drove all night to meet Watus and Bill at the track in Amarillo. The fun part was that the car came close to winning or won every race we entered.  This was drag racing at it's best for me.

As the summer flew past Dennis became increasingly unhappy with situation with the race car.  I used all my positive powers to try to keep the waters smooth but when it was decided that the car should move out of our garage and down to Reeder Row in Dallas where all the top area racers were Dennis was very unhappy.  It only made sense to me as everyone who had cars on Reeder Row also had the knowledge to make the car a consistent winner. Besides the knowledge there was a lot of parts trading and fine tuning that went on that kept us winning races. In truth the car moved to keep Dennis from tinkering on it as he made no great effort to learn or understand the workings of the Chrysler engine.  It was then that I realized that Dennis did not care as much about winning as he did about simply owning a car that he could spend his time just tinkering on, bragging to his friends about and just sitting in the garage so he could look at it.

As with all racing engines which are just waiting for a chance to blow up ours did right at the end of the racing season.  It was good timing from the aspect that it happened before Dennis, Watus and Bill came to words about the partnership that would not have been pleasant.  We had entered the National race in Indianapolis a couple of weeks after the engine went kaput and no time to repair it. We already had tickets and even motel reservations for the six of us and we all went together but it was not a very pleasant weekend. After that weekend Dennis ended up selling the entire car to Watus and was quitting racing forever.  Needless to say I was not a happy camper.  Racing Top Alcohol with Watus and Bill was really fun even with all the ups and downs.  It was worth all the time and effort, worth all the extra hours of no sleep to stay caught up in school, worth all the money and things we had given up through the years to go racing.  I probably tried to get him not to sell the car but I had never learned how to argue with anyone and successfully make a point.  Instead I just added black stars on my imaginary chart every time I thought about it for years.

So, now what?  

Alcohol and Chemistry Formulas

I never did figure out why this tall, skinny guy named Jimmy Parker wondered into our garage one late summer day in 1975 with an interesting proposition.  He was not someone we knew and why he came to us will always remain unknown.  But he had an engine and we had a car so he offered us the chance to go racing in the fairly new class of Top Alcohol Dragster.

Maybe a few facts very brief facts about drag racing might be in order here.  Drag racing had evolved from the early fifties from guys meeting on Saturday night on out of the way roads (like the road by Davis Airfield in Muskogee where I grew up) to little drag strips out in the country, to multi-million race tracks. The types of cars had progressed from cars people drove to work or school everyday to ones that were especially built for the sport.  Much like the evolution that happened from stock car racing to NASCAR.

There are classes for the basic stock cars and classes, depending on engine size and the type of fuel used, for the dragster, funny cars and altereds. Dennis and I had been running in what was called competition eliminator with a six cylinder Ford engine and then a small block V-8 Ford engine.  Those classes were way down on the list as to how fast they ran, how expensive they were and how much time and energy it took to keep them running. In everyday life you could compare this to driving a beat up 1971 Fiat versus a brand new Mustang.

So what do you do when someone wonders up and offers you the chance to go race with the "big boys"?  Top Alcohol Dragster was the second category down from the fastest cars, Top Fuel Dragster, the only difference being the car ran on methane or alcohol instead of nitromethane.  Dennis was doubtful, I was ecstatic.  Dennis's big question was who was going to drive the car as he did not seem to want to (driving was not his thing).  Jimmy Parker had an idea.

                                           Watus Simpson



The next Saturday Jimmy showed up with an ex-top fuel racer named Watus Simpson. Watus was well known as one of the very good drivers and an all around nice guy.  Somehow that Saturday afternoon everyone agreed to give the partnership a chance.  A flurry of activity began and in a matter of a couple of weeks the dragster was together with Parker's blown Hemi engine.  With no paint on the race car, no fooling around with testing and tuning for weeks on end we were off to the last race of the season in El Paso, Tx. The dragster ran very well, we won a few rounds, learned a lot and everyone got along well. This was "fun" drag racing!  Now we had the winter to get our act together.

            Watus's Sons and friend Sam waiting to make a run

Another interesting fact about drag racing.  Except for some of the National Events drag races were scheduled on a Saturday and Sunday.
When Dennis and I raced the C and D gas dragster we did not travel very far to race, maybe Tulsa and Houston were the furthest.  Switching to the alcohol car the races were a little further away and everyone worked so the final preparations on the car usually occurred on Friday evening.  It always seemed like we did not get on the road until 2:00 or 3:00 o'clock in the morning. The goal was always to get to the race track about 8:00 in the morning.  Since I was the only one who did not work guess who got to tow the trailer down the highway in the middle of the night. Somehow I always managed to get us there and back home on Monday morning in time for everyone to go to work and I to school.  A few bottles of Pepsi and chatter on the CB radio and I could have driven to Canada.

Of course I was back in school juggling studying, the house, the boys and the race car.  That fall I jumped into Calculus, Biology and Chemistry.  I guess I figured if I took what looked to be the hardest for me first I would know if I was smart enough to make it.  I was terrified of the Calculus class but it turned out to be one of the easiest classes I ever took.  The Chemistry was a challenge but Biology was fun.  With taking twelve hours including labs it wasn't easy and my sleeping time on test days was severely cut back.  I can remember going to bed at 9:00 and getting up at midnight to study. Also probably guilty of distracted driving as I would make index cards of formulas and stuff and study them on the thirty mile drive to Denton.


That semester I met another gal a few years older than I was trying to get her degree.  We ended up in a lot of the same classes and it felt very good to not be the only "old Lady" in school.  Actually all the teeny boppers came to hate us as we always managed to set the grading curve pretty high.  The other nice thing about being an older student was that all of the professors understood the balancing act we were doing to come back to college.  After Wally started going to the child care center at TWU they would send me a note to class if he was sick. I then had to go get him and there were many times he sat in my lap for some lecture or sat on a stool in some biology or chemistry lab.  Missing a class was definitely not in my playbook.

Have to admit that one occasion occurred that I did miss a few days of class.  Ford Motor Company did annual trips to honor dealerships and guys in the service departments that met quotas or whatever.  In the spring of 1976,  Dennis as Owner Relations Manager, we got to go on one to St. Maarten Island in the Caribbean.  Was I, who had never seen the ocean or been out of the country, going to turn that trip down for Chemistry class?  Not Hardly.  Of all the future Ford trips I got to go on that was my very favorite.  It was the most beautiful place, the nicest people and the only one when Dennis did not get sick or lose his luggage or throw a "fat fit" or end up not talking to me for two weeks after we got home.

                                  Wally and Wes on Wally's 1st Birthday

Spring also meant the beginning of racing season after working on the car and trailer all winter.  What a season it was!

Back To School

If I was terrified going to the first day of Algebra class the first day of summer school at Texas Women's University the trip home was even worse. The decision to take the class in summer school sounded very logical in my pea size brain as that was the class I was most worried about.  A concentrated class everyday with nothing else to have to study sounded logical.

Visions of Mrs. Sharp with her comfortable shoes, silky flowery dresses and blue lips and tongue (Dad said that was from medicine she took) flashed through my mind.  I was fourteen and in the ninth grade when she became my teacher for the first year of what was termed "New Math".  The poor woman had no idea of what she was teaching or at least that was my excuse.  Then there was Mr. Grant in the tenth grade who let me come in early everyday to try to make sense of all the silly little scribbles involved in Algebra. He was kind, always cheerful and tried hard to etch some of it in my brain to no avail.  I actually dropped out of accelerated classes in the eleventh grade using mononucleosis as an excuse when it was really a phobia about MATH. 

To make matters even worse Dr. Smith, head of the math department, looked younger than my twenty-eight years and the other seven students were giggling eighteen year old girls.  Nothing that first day of class made any sense at all and maybe it would be best just to never return to that place.  There were probably some tears that day as I only had a thirty mile drive home to decided whether to tell the babysitter to return the next day or not. Maybe I should just not go back to college, stay home and be a good Mom, a good corporate wife and drag racer.

When I got home Wes and Wally were happy, the babysitter was happy
and everything was just fine.  As the baby sitter walked out the door she said she would see me tomorrow at the same time.  Out of my mouth came the word "great".  Guess I had made up my mind to not give up. Those were the days long before the term multi-tasking was used for women but it was certainly the beginning of mine.

It was a struggle to find time to do homework or at least attempt to do homework.  Wes was a very active five year old and Wally was only nine months old.  Dinner needed to be on the table at 5:05 and evenings were always busy especially since I had spoiled Dennis and he was not enthralled with my going back to school.  That was when my habit of getting up during the wee hours of the morning began.  There is something about having the absolute quiet at two or three o'clock in the morning when no one wants anything and you can't do anything except sit quietly so as not to awake anyone that made studying easy and actually fun.

The second day of class was the real shocker.  Maybe Dr. Smith did not want to spend his summer grading homework papers as he called on each student to put a homework problem on the board.  He would then go through each of the algebra problems and show what was right and what was wrong.  Needless to say the first few weeks mine were completely wrong. Once I got over being embarrassed about not getting the problems right and I realized there was no crying in math something clicked.  All of a sudden the funny squiggles, infinity and the angle of the dangle made sense.  First semester I managed of B and the second semester, which was Trig, was actually a pretty easy A. Wow, maybe I wasn't so stupid after all.

While I was busy juggling children, college and house hold duties the new Paul Peyton chassis arrived.  Weekends were busy building a body for it as well as for other racers.  No vacations for the weary except the annual trip to Indianapolis for the big NHRA race of the year which had become our only vacation. One thing about drag racing is that they were always scheduled to end on a night before one had to go back to work the next day.  I lost count of the number of times through the years that we arrived home from some distance place around dawn when Dennis had to be at work that morning and the children had to be in school. I probably passed a lot of interesting sights to see but missed them due to total darkness.

When school started in the fall Wally was only ten months old and needless to say not potty trained yet so I kept the babysitting service at home.  It actually worked out well since Wes started half-day kindergarten and could walk the block home when I was not there. That he could walk home is probably not the approved thing to do these days but was quite normal then as well as no car seats and such. The other advantage to the baby sitting service was that if one sitter could not come it was the job of the service to find another one. That saved a lot of headaches.

Wes, Wally and a neighbor at Wes' 5th Birthday Party

Sometime that summer a guy came by the garage one day with a very interesting proposition concerning the dragster.  Dennis was dubious of strangers bearing gifts.  I was awestruck at the thought of it as it would change the entire direction of what we were doing in racing.

                                        Oreo Cookies, anyone?

I'd Have to Have been Crazy

It is interesting to look back an realize how some events change and shape our lives.  For some it may be one huge moment or event.  For me it was a quite subtle series of things.

Arriving home from the hospital with a new baby I not only had a husband and a four year old but also Dennis's Mother and Father. Dennis had taken some time off from work not to entertain his parents or help with four year old Wes but because he had stuff to do in the garage.  Dr. Herndon always saw his patients each week for four weeks after the delivery of a baby and it was not a great visit the week after Wally was born. Seems like my blood pressure was really high when I went in for the first checkup.  He instructed me to go home and tell Dennis's parents to go home when I explained the scenario at home.  He wanted me back in his office in four days and if the blood pressure was not down I would be back in the hospital.  That certainly did not go over well with Dennis but they did disappear the same afternoon.  Blood pressure was back to normal on Friday.

Wally was a newborn that people dream about having.  He slept through the night very early and just a sweet little guy.  At about five weeks of age he suddenly began having what is called projectile vomiting.  Hours after he ate he would throw up formula that seemed like it just came from the bottle instead of being sour smelling and it came up with such force that it flew across the room.  That was a little scary so off the see our pediatrician.

Dr. Pharo was a very soft spoken and very conscientious as I had learned with Wes.  He explained to me that it sounded like pyloric stenosis which causes the muscle at the bottom of the stomach to slowly close prohibiting the digestion of food.  Since it was a Friday he sent us home with instructions to give Wally Benadryl over the weekend to see if it helped.  When Dr. Pharo called on Sunday night I told him Wally was actually a little worse.  So he told me to take Wally to Children's hospital on Monday morning.  By a stroke of luck we got the best pediatric surgeon in the state of Texas.  Wally and I spent the night at the hospital, surgery the next morning, first feeding at 11:00 AM and sent home at 2:00 in the afternoon when the formula stayed down.  No more problems so it was pretty simple.

Dennis decided that the dragster would not run well because the chassis was no good.  Good old me did not argue even though there were a lot of very good running cars with the same chassis.  He sold the chassis and immediately ordered a new one from a local chassis builder and friend, Paul Peyton.  That made for a relatively quiet winter except 
that he found an English Bulldog puppy born on the same day as Wally so it became the Christmas puppy and dog number dog six. He also did replace the flathead engine in the 1950 Mercury with a Ford V-eight.

This was 1975 and the days of the dare devil motorcycle guy named Evel Knieval.  Wes had an Evel Knieval toy, we had actually gone to see him jump over many semi-trucks at Green Valley Raceway and all the kids in the neighborhood were crazy about him. I have to admit that I thought he was really pretty cool in that bad boy sort of persona.  The neighbor kids built a jump ramp on the sidewalk and one weekend while working in the garage I watched the kids, including four and a half year old Wes going up the ramp and flying through the air.  Sure looked like fun.  Looked like lots more fun than building somebodies's race car body.

Have you guessed yet what my next move was?  I borrowed one of the kid's bikes and decided to fly through the air myself.  It looked pretty easy and if Wes could do it I certainly could.  Well, I guess I did not fully get the idea that you should keep pedaling and keep the speed up as you were going up the ramp.  At the top of the ramp the front wheel dropped off the end due to lack of speed and I did fly through the air without the bike with the greatest of ease.  I splatted on the sidewalk on my face. All I can remember after landing was my neighbor calling the ambulance and Dennis asking me where my insurance card was. The ambulance ride is a total blur.

One look at me in the emergency room and they called a plastic surgeon as no other doctor wanted to touch the mess I had made of my face. I did get up off the gurney a couple of hours into the wait for the plastic surgeon to go to the bathroom.  I looked in the mirror and thought "Boy, you have really done it this time" as my whole face was skinned up and my upper lip was split from the center of my lip to the left corner of my nose.  Not a pretty sight.

The plastic surgeon arrived after about a three hour wait.  He looked at me and asked how in the hell did I do that.  When I told him I tried to do an Evel Knieval stunt he rolled in laughter and asked me how old I was.  Proudly I told him I was a twenty-eight year old mother of two.  He then told me I should have paid more attention to how many times Evel had crash landed so I came back at him with how sexy I thought Evel was.  We got off to a good start and I think he delighted in sticking the needles in to deaden the lip for a multitude of stitches. Evidently I had run one of my upper front teeth through my bottom lip and just to prove to me how stupid I was he did not deaden it when he stitched the inside of my bottom lip up. That Hurt! The really hard part before the lip healed up was laughing. I guess I was the only person who thought the stunt was funny and I would have to hold my lip together to laugh with no pain.

Mom and Dad had been after me to go back to school.  Dad and I spent many hours when I was growing up talking about doctors and medicine. He really always wanted me to go to medical school.  My SAT scores showed I should avoid math and science at all costs and study something a little less intellectual. I had managed to garner eighty-seven hours in college without those two subjects before I quit the third time. Due to their wanting me to finish and a couple of doctors that really inspired me I decided to go back to college.  

It was a little daunting to find out to graduate with a pre-med degree that I only needed fifty-two hours of math and science. I chose to go and was accepted at Texas Women's University in Denton rather than North Texas University as I felt I would do better not competing against guys in math and science. All my female friends thought I was crazy, my parents were overjoyed and Dennis was laughing figuring I would flunk out the first semester. I also kept selling ceramic items to Margaret's Bed and Bath shop on Greenville Avenue in Dallas to pay for my tuition even though Dennis moaned for three years that he never thought he would have to put his wife through college. Everyone in Dallas County must have had a little ceramic bathtub soap dish.

Dr. Chandler, the plastic surgeon, and Dr. Herndon both were inspiration and both became my cheerleaders for the next three years. Dr. Chandler did boob jobs for several of my friends, My Mom came down and had her eyes done later a facelift so he and I stayed in contact even though I did not do any more Evel Knieval stunts.  He was interesting from the fact that he got a lot of his training serving on a medical ship during the Vietnam War taking care of injured soldiers.  He also had Insurance Only written across my chart in big red letters.  Of course I had insurance but his policy was if insurance did not cover an accident that needed plastic surgery then he would never send out a bill.  He always said he made enough money from insurance and cosmetic surgeries to do just fine. He also looked over my past college transcripts and told me if I was really intending to try for medical school I needed a 4.0 average in the rest of my classes.  Nothing like a little pressure before you even get started.

Luckily I had used a babysitting service on some weekends when we traveled with the race car.  They were older ladies that came to your house and stayed for a couple of hours or for an entire weekend.  The great thing was that they charged a dollar an hour and the house was always cleaner than when I left it and the boys were happy.  Wally could not go to the TWU Child Care Center until he was potty trained and Wes would be in kindergarten the following September.  Knowing that the first class I had to take was Algebra I enrolled only in it for the summer school session in June of 1975.

Needless to say after I enrolled I became terrified.  I was ten years older than anyone else in the class, hadn't studied anything except a cookbook or car parts for six or seven years and the instructor was none other than the Dean of the Math Department. Just what was I thinking!

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Put On A Happy Face

Mother and George

There is an old adage that most girls marry guys like their fathers.  I guess that stems from the fact that the father is the first male roll model and it feels familiar and comfortable.  My Dad was quiet, easy going on the outside, always listened and in his eyes I could do no wrong.  Mother on the other hand was loving one minute and totally 
unpredictable the next.  I always tried to be good, wear clothes she wanted me to wear, make good grades and do everything she wanted me to do. But the rules would change and I was always a disappointment to her.  After being married to Dennis for eight years I began to realize that I had married the personality traits of my Mother.

The year of 1974 started out pretty good.  We had the new Ed Mabry chassis, a new body and a new trailer.  I also found out I was pregnant with a due date sometime in October.  After being off two months on Wes's birth there was no need to set a real date this early.

Although I was not crazy about getting a boxer puppy she turned out to be a pretty sweet dog.  Her name was Dandy and she seemed quite alright with Wes poking at her eyes and pulling on her ears.  Since Dennis was still travelling every week and I was the one feeding her she quickly became my dog.  Dandy slept by my side of the bed at night, followed me to my ceramic workshop in the back yard to curl up in the boxes of shredded paper while I worked and was by my side all the time.

Wes and Dandy

The new dragster chassis got the 302 Ford engine installed and several attempts to get it to run consistently did not happen.  One night before the lettering and pin stripping was done on the car Dennis lost his temper when I offered a suggestion about what to do to the engine.  After all I had been around long enough to know something about them.  He flew into a rage and yelled at me that he felt like he was whipping a dead horse.  Anyone should know you should not yell at a pregnant woman.  Thank heavens Ralph and Mark popped in at that moment.  I was on the verge of tears but they thought the dead horse thing was the funniest thing they had heard in a long time and brought me to laughter.  When the ace painter, Zero Wasson, came to finish the car he painted a cartoon of a horse laying on it's back with all four hooves in the air.  The car was known from then on as the Dead Horse.

Town East Craft Show

Wes was growing like a weed, had a vivid imagination, never stopped talking or moving. At four years of age he was actually a lot of fun although there were times when I wanted to choke him. One time at a craft show at Town East Mall Wes and a fellow artist's little girl were playing behind us and then they were gone. Anne was panic stricken while I was not too concerned.  Anyone who took Wes would bring him back in ten minutes.  After about thirty minutes with Mall Security looking for them they were found eating ice cream cones in the mall office. It looked like my craft show days were numbered if I had to have a four year old with me all day.

                                                        Wes

The only friends I kept in contact with were Cathie and Pam from Stephens.  Pam had graduated from college in Arizona and went back to L.A. to work in banking.  I have stacks of letters and postcards from all around the world from her travels.  Cathie went to Texas Tech, met a great guy named Terry, got married and graduated with a mathematics teaching degree.  I always found it funny that she married an accountant and got a degree in math when she taught me to use red ink in my checkbook when I was overdrawn.

One day Cathie appeared on my doorstep.  That would be the first of many fun surprise visits through the years.  Wes fell instantly in love her with and said that when he grew up he was going to marry her.  Of course Cathie loved that.  Dennis and I took her out to dinner to the Old San Francisco Steakhouse where there was a waiting line.  Some bubba in line behind us started making remarks to her which were not very nice.  She turned around, stared at him with those huge blue eyes and told him in a very loud voice exactly where and what he could do with his male appendage.  Everyone in the line gasped and I thought Dennis was going to faint.  The bubba went silent for a few minutes and then apologized to her. That was typical Cathie and I loved every visit.  Dennis did not.

Sometime that spring or summer Dennis got a promotion from service rep to Owner's Relations Manager and the travelling slowed down.  After four years of him being gone all week he was suddenly home for dinner at 5:05 every afternoon.  He brought work home almost every night and it was not an easy adjustment to say the least.  Two things stand out in my mind.  One night Wes was running though the house playing and Dennis shouted for me to shut that screaming brat up.  The other was his statement that if he ever had a handicapped child he would put it in some institution.  Neither comment set very well with me as I had always thought I wanted to have six boys and I was pregnant at that time.  Time to rethink having any more children.

Although I had not kept in contact with any of my high school friends or even seen any of them on trips to Muskogee to see family I got a letter about our ten year reunion.  I really wanted to go.  After all I had spent all of my school years with these friends.  A year before I had organized and got all of Dennis's class together for a reunion so I assumed we would go to mine. Oh, how wrong could I be? There was some excuse about me being six months pregnant - so?  All I know is that I did not get to go and spent that entire weekend crying.   I ran out of imaginary black stars for awhile over that one.

October rolled around .  The dragster was still behaving like a dead horse making that part of my life difficult.  Dandy, the boxer, had developed Demodectic mange when she was about four months old.  Many trips to several vets and hundreds of dollars did not cure it.  She could no longer come in the house and it was getting cold outside.  It broke my heart but on the advice of the vet I had to put her down.

George had gone fishing one weekend at Beaver's Bend and came home on Sunday night telling Mom he thought he had gotten a cold.  Mom was going to school to become a nurse since George did not want her to work.  She had gotten a job when they first got married but he told her she was ruining his tax bracket so he gave her a couple of gas wells and an allowance to stay home.  When she came home from class on Monday morning she could not understand anything George said.  In the emergency room it was determined he had gotten stung by a wasp,  had viral encephalitis and lapsed into a coma that night.  He passed away on Thursday at the age of 57. They had only been married for four years during which Mother was the happiest I had ever seen her.

After a quick visit with Dr. Herndon on Friday he gave me a thumbs down on going to Oklahoma City to George's memorial service on Saturday.  Dennis attended the service which was probably not very comforting for Mother as they never got along well.

                                                                          Wally

I messed up Dr. Herndon's office hours on Monday by giving birth to Walter William Tarkington that afternoon.  Another healthy eight pound baby boy. One might think "What else could possibly happen?".  Well, life-changing events always seemed to pop up out of nowhere and grab you.  Seemed to happen often in our household and I was becoming very adept at putting on the happy face.