Though I've never been to Reno, it looms large in my childhood memories. Dad spent the summer of 1968 there doing who-knows-what for Nalco, a company later absorbed into Halliburton. [See "Remembering Dad" (11/2010)]
He told me decades later how he toured several subterranean levels of a military facility in the desert, and got stopped on his way out by a guard who told his host, "This guy isn't authorized to see what you showed him." Before it was straightened out, Dad figured Mom would be told that he'd been in a terrible accident.
Mom took her first plane flight to join him for a few weeks. Back home in Chicago, we got Grandmother for our babysitter, so I wasn't complaining.
During his time there, Dad took up wood carving. For me, who that summer had discovered Mad magazine, he carved the iconic Alfred E. Neuman. [See photo. Read "MAD Sanity" (04/2013)]
A few years later, Dad made his masterpiece, a portrait of our West Highland Terrier "Colonel" (below). [For more on Colonel, see "My Life in Dogs" (07/2019)]
Next stop: 218 miles to San Francisco! (I've got a 30 mile head start.)
←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.
No comments:
Post a Comment