I grew up in a large country family. I was the youngest of eight kids. I was the first even born in a hospital and I got my start on a dirt road, next moving up to a gravel road, and then living on a gravel road with thick hot oil poured over it, and all in the same house (we had it moved on the back of a truck!). My dad was the second oldest of six kids and my mom was somewhere around the fifth of eight children. My dad’s family lived on and worked a farm. My mom’s father died when she was a baby and she was raised by a widow who lived on little. My dad lived outside of Zaneis, Oklahoma (yeah, look it up). My mom grew up in Wilson, Oklahoma, the birth place of Chuck Norris. Wow! I grew up in Tussy, Oklahoma, not Tulsa. I said we were country people.

I was born in 1952. Both my parents were born somewhere around 1916 or 1917. They grew up during the closing stages of World War I or the Great War as it was known at the time, the Great Depression, and World War II. They witnessed the Korean War together. My mom died in 1964 and my dad lived until 1998. All three of the grandparents we’d grown up with died while I was in college in the early 1970s. They all worked hard and lived pretty austere and hard lives. They were every bit as happy as anybody I’ve ever known though, rich or poor. They worked hard, laughed hard, and lived with what they had. They didn’t expect much and they certainly didn’t feel entitled. There was alcoholism, addiction to prescription medication, depression, and other issues present. They were a part of what has been labeled “The Great Generation” though—the generation who really made America the great nation it became and that we’re trying to preserve at present.

Only in retrospect over the years have I been able to realize all the lessons I learned from all of them. Yeah, I could write a cartoon story verbally caricaturing of them all, and they would have been the first to laugh at it, as they joked constantly. However, beneath the Sunday comic veneer laid a treasure trove of invaluable lessons.

One of my favorites was a lesson we were taught about sex and the avoidance of any illicit form of it. Nobody ever talked to us in any constructive way about sex that I remember. There were whisperings and jokes and even country-crude references and so forth, but as far as I could tell nobody ever talked seriously or informatively about it. After my mom died we rarely saw her family, so the extended family I grew up around was my dad’s. We went to see them most weekends. My mom and dad had lived for a while with his parents and my mother dearly loved my paternal grandmother. It broke my grandmother’s heart when my mom died (as it of course did us all). But my grandmother tried hard to love us as she knew our mom would want.

Well, I brought up about sex because when my sister Joy was a senior in high school, Jack was sophomore and I was a freshman, our grandmother tried to sort-of talk to us about sex, using her own chastity to make the point. She told us about how before she was married, somewhere around 15 or 16 years-old I believe, my grandfather-to-be came over after a hot, dusty day of riding horses and doing farm work. He asked my quite young grandmother-to-be to get a wash cloth and wash his neck. At that point, we were abhorred at the mere thought of washing someone’s dirty neck in the first place, but it is a statement about their times. Although we didn’t have a shower but only a bath tub, we did have indoor plumbing with running water and were quite capable of washing our own necks.

You gotta remember they didn’t have any of that as we’re talking the turn of the century here. She told us that she started to do it and then she thought and told him, “I know what you’re trying to do here; you can wash your own neck!” It took us a minute to realize that she was actually telling us that he was putting a move on her by asking her to wash his dirty neck! Wasn’t he the smooth playboy?! She went on to tell us she never let any man stick his tongue in her mouth either. We were stunned, ready to burst out laughing, and were left to try the rest of our lives to figure out all the lessons there. I’ll leave the story with you to work on by yourself. My granny, Addie Ruth Worsham, was a trip though.