As the heading indicates, I was born and raised in the rather conservative south Texas town of Victoria. Born on September 20, 1943 in what was then DeTar Hospital. It was a nice place in which to grow up, although I don't think I'd particularly want to live there now. This is just a personal opinion and certainly not intended to apply to anyone else.

I can just about remember all of my teachers in school. The public schools were really good back in the stone age, where we walked to school in the snow, uphill both ways! Perhaps they are still good down in the wilds of Victoria.

For your possible amusement, I'll recall a few of my teachers. There was Miss Prado (3rd grade in William Offer Elementary) from whom I learned phonics (... a, e, i o, u and sometimes w & y ...). Mrs. Eggert taught me the delights of diagramming sentences in the 8th grade (Patti Welder Junior High). In that 8th grade English class, I came to understand the objective case (You know, that's where you learn to say, "...to whom," instead of "to who." It's a lesson many newscasters of today could learn.

There was a gentle, soft spoken Mr. Summers who taught me 7th grade mathematics (again, Patti Welder Junior High). Ah yes, and in high school (Victoria High School. There was no Stroman High School then), there was the late Mr. Norwood who taught me algebra. It was he, who suggested that I didn't have the capabilities necessary to study mathematics. He was close. I only have a B.A. and an M.A. in mathematics. Now you know why I am loath to recommend to any student that s/he shouldn't study a particular subject ... regardless of what I might think.

Mrs. Seale taught we two years of Latin in high school. I liked it well enough to study it two more years as a university undergraduate. Nobody said I wasn't a little strange. Dare we say it? A bookworm, yea verily, a quintessential geek! If you doubt it, check the pens in my pocket. Of course in those days, we had slide rules. I still have my K&E log-log duplex decitrig.

Mr. Seale (husband of the lady noted above) taught me history and economics. I was very lucky. Instead of having a coach who was "teaching" history on the side, I actually had someone with a masters degree in the discipline. He was a delight: sarcastic as the dickens!  Reckon any of it rubbed off on me?

Now that I've remembered those coaches, I'll give a partial reason for my academic bent. Although I've blotted the names of my P.E. coaches, I still remember their modus operandi: Toss the football to one of two jocks (you know the type, knuckles dragging the ground) in the class and telling them to choose up sides and play a little football. After these instructions, the coach would retire to his air conditioned office.

The rest of us would walk to the playing field at the end of the parking lot. Two guesses who was the last chosen as teams were selected. "You got Sawey! Yuk! Yuk!"

I'm hopeful that folks in the P.E. business now try to help everybody reach his or her potential, rather than pampering those who already can do this stuff. Had things been different back then, maybe I would not abominate sports.

In any case, I resolved to excel in what I could do: academics, and the rest is, as they say, "History." Well actually, there are a few more web pages.

Oh yes, lest you think that the books were all that interested me, I was really a very zealous prudish prig of a fundamentalist. do you suppose there's any redundancy in that description?