What a handsome looking guy! Since I mentioned it in the first post I thought I would start with this photo. I spent a fair amount of time fixing this one. It was dog eared and starting to crack a lot.

This is kind of eerie. When I was small I used to talk a lot about being in the army with my dad. If you could get a good look at the guy in the back ground that is standing on the right hand side of the door, you'd see that my high school graduation picture looks a lot (I mean a LOT!) like him. It sort of freaked me out the first time I saw this picture.

My dad served in World War Two. He was a truck driver and served first in North Africa. then on to Italy and France. I don't think he was part of the move into Germany because I can't remember him ever mentioning it.

It was difficult to get him to talk a lot about his time in the army. In fact he would never talk about combat so I'm just guessing he was part of some pretty serious stuff. However there are a couple of stories I can tell you.

The one that stands out most is his story of a guy he watched in North Africa that makes the point of how precious water was. He said this guy sat down with a bowl of water, unwrapped his turban and started washing himself using the turban as a wash cloth. He would continue to dip the turban in the water and wipe himself down. When he finished is "bath" he wrapped his head with the turban, lifted the bowl and took a good long drink.

The other story he told often was when he was in France he spent some time along the French Riviera. He and a buddy went down to the beach to watch the girls. The real interest was the French girls would go down to the beach and change into their bathing suites right on the beach. However, my dad said that the girls were so good that he was never able to catch a glimps of what he was really interested in!

Well, this is an example of what I hope to do. I wish I had more pictures of the old man when he was younger than this, but I have never seen any. When the mood hits me just right, I'll share some stories about his life when I can.