Let's see... I was born in the first half of the 20th Century. Harry Truman was President, gasoline cost 17 cents a gallon,
the USSR tested it's first Atomic Bomb, The Communist Peoples Republic of China was declared by Mao Tse Tung.
Rodgers and Hammerstein opened a new musical on Broadway... 'South Pacific'.
Bruce Springsteen was 2 weeks old.

Actually, it was less than three months before it stopped being the first half and became the second half...
technically it still was the first half... October 8th 1949 to be exact. 

Think of three channels of black and white television that wasn't even broadcasting during the night
KDKA, WTAE, and WIIC, (WQED would not begin to broadcast until April 1st, 1954.) Did I mention it was black and white?

No MTV or any of that, can't complain about no FOX News though (learned to think on my own).
also no Jerry Springer or 'Housewives of...', no C-Span either though.

I watched The Howdy Doody Show, Kraft Masterpiece Theatre, Milton Berle, The Honeymooners, and I Love Lucy....
When they originally aired... live.  Early television did not have the luxury of being on tape, there was no video-tape.
Everything from the news to your favorite weekly comedy or variety show was done in real time.
You made a mistake and the entire country saw it.

I survived with things called 'books' (seems it's some sort of a 'non-volatile storage medium')
Loved adventure stories, 'Captain Blood', 'Scaramouche', 'Master-at-Arms' and anything else Raffael Sabatini wrote.
"The Three Musketeers', 'Les Miserables', and 'Tintin' were my companions along with 'The Illiad'  and 'The Oddesy'.
The works of Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, H. G. Wells, and Mary Renault ('The Bull from the Sea').

The Adventures of Tintin

Wonderful drawings in a 'comic book' style.
The author, Herge, never just 'drew a car'. It would be a particular car and accurate to the smallest detail.
Now we have 'Beavis and Butthead' and 'Squidbillies'. Why did I waste time in art school?

Soon to be a movie, the CGI actors certainly look the part...

Oh, and  'Tom Swift Jr.'!   

Not to be confused with 'Tom Swifties' such as:
"Who would want to steal modern art?" asked Tom abstractedly. 

You know...
 'Tom Swift  and his Flying Lab.'                
 'Tom Swift  and his Atomic Earth Blaster.
 'Tom Swift  in the Caves of Nuclear Fire.''

and my favorite...

 

What red-blooded 11 year old would not want a car that could not only drive
but could travel on (and under) the ocean and fly to boot!

Wikipedia's entry.

Not great literature but a lot of fun when you are 11 years old!

I also read biographies, history, and pretty much anything I could get my hands on.  We played in the dirt, literally.
There were no game consoles, personal computers, cell phones... Hell, if you had a wrist-watch it had hands on it!

No one knew anybody who couldn't drink milk, or eat wheat... there was the rare person who was allergic to strawberries.
Neighborhoods were safe and you could play outside all day without needing to have a GPS chip embedded in your ass.

                              You darn well better be home by the time the street-lights came on though!

Grade-school was a waste of time, I never would have heard of Charles Darwin and the Theory of Evolution if I had not read about it myself, history stopped at 1945 with no mention of what happened in the intervening 20 years, nothing about Korea or Viet-Nam or the Civil-Rights movement. There was time, however, to go over the lives of the saints in detail.
Getting beat up after school seemed to be a weekly happening.

Summers were spent at my Grandmother's in Wilmerding (just over the hill from my parents home in Turtle Creek), we played outside with games we made up along with 'tag' although we called it 'It'.  Packing a sandwich and an army-surplus canteen full of water we roamed the 'hills'.  They were good times.
High School was a pretty lonely time, I was neither a Jock nor a Geek so did not belong to any particular clique.
Graduation was the best part because that meant it was over.

Your in the army now... Summer of 1968.

Ever since I was 10 years old and developed a seizure disorder (probably from the trauma of getting hit in the forehead by a baseball-bat,) all I ever heard was 'you can't go out for sports', 'You can't go on the outing', 'You can't. You can't, You can't'...
So I enlisted... I spent the next 3 years as a 97D20 (intelligence coordinator). I finished my tour with 14 months in Viet-Nam.
Why 14 months instead of 12 months? Well, again reading served me well. Seems there was an AR (army regulation) that stated if you returned to CONUS (Continental United States) from a short-tour with less than 150 days of service obligation remaining you would be discharged. So I went to the personnel office and extended my tour for 66 days. I could have gotten away with a 65 day extension but I did not want to get messed up by the international dateline. It was 1971...

1971... It was an important year for me. I was finally living on my own, and had my first m2m experience.
It was also a confusing year for me, Stonewall was still a few years in the future and being gay was not an 'acceptable life'.
Public acceptance was as rare then as it is today in a bible belt/conservative bastion state. Over the next two decades I tried to convince myself it was just experimentation, something I could 'outgrow'... I got married to a girl I went to college with.
I do not regret that because I would never have had my son or my grandchildren.

To backtrack a bit I made an attempt at College and flunked out. I wasn't ready yet after Viet-Nam, I partied way too much and finished my first semester with what may be a record for lowest GPA. Seems in college actually going to class is considered important. When I finally buckled down I was admitted to The University of Pittsburgh as a Junior having 'tested out' my first two years. It was in my Senior year that I married. I tried to make things work but I was still who I was and finally sought out male companionship after living like a monk for almost two decades.

My ex-wife and I probably get along better now than we did then and my son has grown up into a fine man who cares about people more than just accumulating money. Flash forward to the mid 1990's...

1996 to the present...

(To be continued)

Under Construction

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
-Aristotle