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Subject: Question Responses -- Farewell Speech

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Hi, please let me introduce myself. My name is Larry Evans.

1. What is your name?

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I was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and I grew up in a place called Radnor, in suburban Philadelphia.

2. Where are you from? Were you born there?

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Please tell me a little about yourself. My parents, Palmer and Millie, had four boys – Bob, Dave, Gary, and me. I am the youngest.

3. What is your family like?

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My grandparents on my Mom’s side, Robert L. “Papa” King and Thelma E. “Mama” King, played a big role in my childhood. My Dad’s parents, Alvin and Georgina, passed before I was born. Alvin remarried, and my Dad’s Stepmom, my Grandma Jean, would visit with us from time to time. I had aunts, uncles, and cousins: Uncle Joe and Aunt Ann, with their son, my cousin Joey; Uncle Floyd and Aunt Marie, who gave us my cousins Sharon, Carolyn and Pete. I also have a cousin Ronnie, whose dad I never knew – my Uncle Bob. Papa and Mama King kept a photo of my Uncle Bob, a handsome young man in his Army Air Corps uniform, where they could see him. Bob was their Gold Star; he was on the crew of a bomber that went missing over the English Channel during World War II.
My oldest brother Bob never married, my brother Dave married Barb, and my brother Gary married Linda. I married Jill. Dave and Barb were the only ones among us to have children, my nephews Patric and Matt, and my niece Lauren. Dave's children are all grown up. Patric married Aimee and Matt married Yvette, and both of my nephews now have children of their own. Lauren is single.

4. Do you have a large family or a small family? Please tell me who they are.

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My childhood home was on a couple of acres in the Philadelphia suburb of Radnor, Pennsylvania, and there were a lot of woods I could explore. I used to climb some of the tall trees and would go exploring ruins of old houses and mansions built in the 1700s and 1800s. We played baseball and kickball a lot, too.

5. What was your childhood like?

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I have been called "Bortzook" (Armenian slang for "little punk," my brother Gary's nickname for me he picked up from my best childhood friend Armen Aboyan's older brother Dan), "Freight Train" (football -- it would take me some time to get going but my momentum was unstoppable), "Old Horse" (favorite), and various obscene words, but none of them stuck to me.

6. Do you have childhood or even adult nicknames, and did any of them stick?

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I had a couple of life experiences as a child that foretold and foreshadowed what my future might be, unknown to me at the time.
I was three years old, and my Mom would set me down next to the record player and play Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and other classical and swing era recordings while she worked around the house. We had a cleaning lady, Mary Hargis, who also looked after us kids -- she was our second Mom, and we called her Aunt Mary since she was very close to my Mom -- and she introduced me at the same time to an entirely different kind of music. Mary listened to a north Philadelphia radio station, and I remember listening to Motown while it was happening, and I particularly remember a very hot artist whom I later figured out was the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. This and other musical experiences as a child created a deep passion in me for listening to music of all kinds, and I grew up to become a music business professional.
Another experience I remember from childhood was watching a football game. It was a game broadcast on national television on December 6, 1969 that I watched from the family room of my childhood home in Pennsylvania. I was unfamiliar with the teams – one team had some sort of pig on their helmets, and the other team had a cow’s head on their helmets. It was a great close game, and at the time I watched it, I had no idea that I would be moving to the town where the cow’s head team was from, and that 10 years after I watched this game, I would enroll at the University of Texas at Austin and become a Longhorn. The pig team was an archrival at that time, the Arkansas Razorbacks. The Longhorns won, 15-14 and went on to win the National Championship in 1969.

7. Did you have life experiences as a child that foreshadowed what might happen to you later in your life?

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I went to Ithan Elementary School and then Radnor Junior High School until 7th Grade, before my family moved away. My third grade music teacher recognized that I had an aptitude for music, and he offered me the opportunity to learn a stringed instrument – violin, viola or cello – but one of my older brothers talked me out of it, telling me that those instruments were for “sissies.” I believed him and did not learn a stringed instrument, and a few years later, I punched him after hearing for the first time Charlie Daniels playing the fiddle on the radio. I was always the tallest kid in my class until I reached high school. Some of my friends put together a rock band in 7th grade, and I got my first taste of what my adult career would be: I managed the band. Six Pack/Open Road was terrible, and so was I, but they did play a concert at a school assembly.

8. Where did you go to school as a child (elementary and junior high/middle school), and did you have any accomplishments – or regrets – you would like to share?

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My family moved away from where I grew up in suburban Philadelphia, and I had to say goodbye to my childhood friends. This was a sad experience at first, but I made new friends at my new school, and it wasn't so bad.

9. Did you experience moving away and saying goodbye to your childhood friends? How did that make you feel at the time?

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We moved across the United States to Austin, Texas in 1972.

10. If you moved as a child, where did you move to?

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I went to Murchison Junior High School and L.C. Anderson High School in Austin, and graduated from Anderson in 1977.

11. Where did you go to high school?

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I played football in Junior High School at Murchison in 8th Grade and made the team as a starter playing both Center and Defensive End. I messed up my knees, though – our coach made us run up and down a steep hill, and I was a growing boy, growing from 5’ 10” to 6’ 3” of my 6’ 6” height during the fall football season -– the strain on my knee joints made them unstable. I tried to play soccer for a year as part of my school's soccer club, but my knees weren't up to the constant running. This was long before soccer was made a varsity sport in Austin public schools -- we had to buy our own balls and equipment, and only two other public high schools had similar teams. We mostly played and got beaten badly by clubs from private school teams that would beat us mercilessly. Otherwise, I did not play sports in high school, much to the chagrin of the basketball coach.

12. Did you play sports in school?

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In high school, I discovered a passion for acting when a friend of mine asked me to go with him to audition for a high school play. I was cast in a small role, and I was hooked. I learned about character acting and character development, and pretty soon, I became a theatre rat – if I wasn’t in class, I was at the theatre working on something. I acted in many plays and musicals and learned all about the technical side of presenting theatre, from lights to sound to props to scenery to stage management. My theatre troupe made it to the Texas State Finals of the UIL One-Act Play Contest, among the Top 8 schools in Texas, three years in a row. I became an Honor Thespian twice over as a member of the theatrical honor society known as The International Thespian Society. As part of the performing arts at my school, I made many friends in the band, orchestra, and concert choir.

13. Did you participate in performing arts in school?

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I never actually became a musician, but I did have a piano, and I've written about 35 original songs, a couple of which are actually pretty good. Regrettably, I did not inherit my Dad’s beautiful baritone singing voice – I got my Mom’s singing voice, and well, you didn’t want to hear Mom sing – but at least I got my Dad’s sense of musical pitch, so my yowling isn’t wildly off-key . . .

14. Do you play a musical instrument, write songs, or sing?

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I count a number of visual artists – painters, sculptors, photographers, etc. – poets and writers among my friends. I have noticed over the years that these are people who are compelled to create art, or to make things out of other materials and media. Some are often starving professionals – people who would go completely bonkers if they did not let that crazy person inside out for a daily spin -- but most are people who create and craft as a hobby or avocation.

15. Do you express yourself in the creation of visual or literary art, or perhaps engage in crafting as a hobby?

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After I graduated from high school, I did not want to go to college. I went to work in the lumber business loading customers’ trucks and learned how to drive a large forklift. I was hired away from that job by a carpentry contractor as a helper, a job I had for about a year. I found I had my Dad’s attention to precise detail – he was an engineer who always did things right, but not quickly – and I ended up taking a job back in the lumber business as a truck driver.

16. Did y0u go to college after high school, or did you go to work?

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My parents had offered me the opportunity to go to college after high school, but I had turned down their offer. After about a year and a half working, though, I realized that my life had come down to thinking about my next truckload delivery, about the beers I would drink after work, and about whether I might get lucky on Saturday Night. My mind was withering away, and my laboring co-workers’ lives were just like mine. We seldom discussed ideas. I decided to ask my parents if their offer to send me to college was still open. Thankfully, it was, and the University of Texas accepted me; I enrolled in 1979.

17. If you went to college, where did you go?

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I had taken several College Level Examination Program (CLEP) tests prior to enrolling at UT. I placed out of two years of college Spanish, and my entire sophomore year of English Literature. I had enrolled at UT as a botany major, but I found out in my first semester that, although I could manage my science courses, I did not do well in the pre-Calculus math course I took. I had just missed placing out of Freshman English, which concentrates on grammar and writing.
So there I was, a 20-year old Freshman in a class filled with 18-year olds. With two years of work experience under my belt, I was a bit cocky in my approach to this course, and I began to write comical and highly satirical essays poking fun at the subject assigned to me to write about. I cleverly broke grammatical rules with impunity (I had an intuitive grasp of grammar rules -- although I couldn't remember the names of the rules, I had to know them in order to break them in the way I did), and I often had the feeling that I would get an “F” on the essays I turned in once per week.
Anne Graybiel, the graduate student teaching assistant who taught my class, started giving me “A”s on my essays, and after four weeks she asked me if I had 30 minutes to spare to come meet with the Professor who was her Ph.D. supervisor. She introduced me to Dr. John Trimble, now Professor Emeritus, who was known as the writing style guru at the University. Anne and John proceeded to tag-team me into joining their Cult. It worked. I changed my Major to English, and I tricked the University of Texas into awarding me a Bachelor of Liberal Arts in English Language and Literature in 1983 by taking liberties with our language. I just so happened to be a member of the 100th – the Centennial – graduating class, and I still have my special burnt orange cap and gown.

18. What was your college experience like, including sorority or fraternity membership (if applicable), and what degree(s) did you earn?

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I always say that I learned as much in a daily coffee klatch in a café at the student union as I ever did in class. We had students from Guatemala, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Israel and various countries in Europe and Asia, and I learned about how other people in the world lived.

19. Do you have any special memories of your college years?

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I worked, self-employed, as a remodeling contractor and house painter while in college and continued to do this work after graduation. Some dear old Philadelphia friends of my parents hired me to do some extensive work on their daughter’s house – a Victorian era house located in Brooklyn, New York. The daughter, who was married with two kids to a child psychiatrist, had been ripped off time and time again by unscrupulous New York contractors, and their house desperately needed repair work. I went to Brooklyn – they paid me well, fed me, and put me up for the seven months it took to repair their home. In the meantime, I got to know New York City quite well. I spent three months in Philadelphia – my old home town – with my eldest brother Bob – and realized that childhood friends my age were actually ten years older than me. I realized how special Austin was, and I returned home.

20. What did you do after you finished your formal education? Did you travel or move around a bit?

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As a child, I grew up watching TV news coverage and reading -- and seeing photos, including the Life Magazine photo of a little girl, naked, who had been burned by napalm -- about the Vietnam War, which ended in 1973, four years before I graduated from high school. Although the Military tried very hard to recruit me for several years after high school – I placed in the 98th or 99th percentile on all but one of the categories in the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) test given in high school – I chose not to volunteer. Other than the Soviet Union, no country could threaten America during the late 1970s, and I had the means to go to college.
A half of a lifetime later, I became my elderly father-in-law’s chauffer for medical care, which he received at the VA Clinic in Austin, Texas. They took great care of him, and we would commonly have at least one medical appointment per week at the clinic. That means we spent quite a bit of time waiting. These were not long waits; they were much shorter than a typical private doctor’s office. The VA Clinic served veterans from World War II through Afghanistan and Iraq, and as the World War II veterans got older, they started opening up about what they did in the war. They were telling stories that they did not want to talk about in their younger years, but now felt that they had to share.
One of the most memorable ones came from a rather slight, wiry old man who said that he had been inserted behind Nazi lines in Germany in early 1945. He was a combat engineer – a saboteur, and his job was to sneak up to telephone poles, shimmy up the pole, and place a satchel charge – a bomb – at the top of the pole to destroy the wires linking Nazi bases and headquarters, taking out their communications. He told a story about shimmying up one pole beside a road, and then seeing and hearing a Nazi Tiger II tank accompanied by a squad of infantry a few hundred yards away. He hid his charge, came down the pole so fast that he got hurt by splinters and was bleeding , and ran to hide in a nearby ditch hoping he had not been spotted, or that no one would see the trail of drops of blood he had left behind. They didn’t notice and kept rolling, but he still had a problem – his mission was not complete. He still had to blow up the telephone pole, and he knew that would bring the tank and soldiers back. He studied his map and plotted the shortest course he could run to get back to Allied lines, a couple of miles. Then he set off the charge and ran really hard. Looking over his shoulder and ducking out of sight when necessary, he ran – and got away to tell the story 72 years later.
I heard a lot of stories like that one, stories that needed to be told. I hope many of them have been told as the Greatest Generation passes on.

21. Did you serve in the Military Services?

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22. If you served in the Military, which Service did you join – U.S. Army / U.S. Army Air Corps, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Coast Guard, or perhaps, during wartime, the U.S. Navy auxiliary known as the U.S. Merchant Marine?

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23. How long were you in the Service, and during which years? Did you serve a hitch or two, or did you make military service your career?

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24. What was your rank? Please tell me the name of the rank (Private First Class, Major, etc.) rather your pay grade designation (E-1, O-4, etc.).

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25. Where were you stationed, and how many times did you move?

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26. What was your main job while in the Service? Were you in combat?

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27. Were you awarded any medals or commendations, and what were those?

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28. Surely you have stories, either about being in war, or about hysterically funny or maybe just touching things that happened during your time in the Service. Please do tell!

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Music has always been one of my passions, from the time I was three years old, and my Mom would set me down next to the record player. It wasn’t a stereo; my family did not get a stereo system until the mid-1960s. I was introduced to classical, swing, and urban music at a very young age, and with three older brothers, folk and rock music from the Beatles and Rolling Stones when they were new. I knew by heart the lyrics to most Beatles songs even though I did not own a Beatles record until the year 2003.
In 1985, I found a job writing reviews of local Austin music recordings and live performances with The Austin Music News, which was published out of the offices of an Austin music recording studio, Europa Sound Centre. The Austin Music News did not publish many issues before it went under, but I struck up a friendship with Europa’s proprietor, the late (and unfortunately named) Peter Butcher.
Peter was a rascally Englishman who looked like Bruce Springsteen and sounded like Monty Python’s Eric Idle. He was a record producer, music publisher, artist manager and talent booking agent who had come to Austin after losing his thriving band booking business in Germany overnight after a Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof Gang bombing of the Ramstein Air Force Base, along with an unsuccessful attempt to steal a nuclear weapon, in southern Germany in 1981. Peter booked bands to perform on NATO military bases all over Europe, and he woke up one morning to find himself profoundly out of business – NATO shut down everything without notice – and more than 6 figures in the hole. Peter relocated to Austin, and opened Europa Sound, which in its brief life produced many of the recordings that defined Austin Music during the 1980s.
I learned the nuts and bolts of the music business from Peter. We started an international music marketing business together as an offshoot to Europa Sound and named it EuroExport. After his studio failed, I reconstituted EuroExport on my own into a repertoire (songs) and artist development company, a company that is now 36 years old. Peter went on to develop and teach the Commercial Music Business curriculum at Austin Community College; he passed away in 1992.
Over the years, I have managed many recording artists, singers, and actors in the music, motion picture and television industries. My music publishing companies own the rights to approximately 200 songs by 14 songwriters.

29. Were you able to pursue your passions and work in a career or a job you loved that made working seem like you were not working at all?

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30. What do you, or if retired, did you do in your working career? What company(-ies) were you with and for how long?

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31. Do you have any funny or perhaps touching stories from your office or workplace? I would love to hear them.

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I was able to join several professional organizations in my field, including the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (The Grammy Awards), the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, and my biography has been published both in Who’s Who in Entertainment and Who’s Who in America.

32. Have you joined professional organizations in your field, or have you been profiled in biographical reference books?

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I attended the South by Southwest Music Conference many times, but 1994 I remember the most. My common practice during the convention was to plant myself in the lobby bar of the Austin Four Seasons Hotel where I could meet with major record label executives, music publishers, lawyers and artists over margaritas – the Four Seasons was where most of these people stayed during the convention.
The bar was always crowded, and we would sit on comfortable chairs and sofas and schmooze with new friends as one does at conventions -- and of course, drink. This was at a time before mobile phones were widely used. My office phone was answered by a computer that would page me – remember pagers? – when I received telephone calls at my office. I would then go around the corner to the bank of pay phones, call and get my messages, and return calls.
One afternoon during the convention, I got up off of my coveted sofa seat to go answer a page, and I returned to find a woman sitting in my space on the sofa.
I did not want to be rude – she came to meet a musician sitting around the table who was a friend of mine – so I knelt down beside the sofa, spoke with her, and got to know her a little bit. I am told that I was smiling the entire time. Her name was Jill, and she had just left a continuing legal education seminar at the hotel next door. She was a civil litigation attorney, and I could tell she was formidable. So I asked her out.
That woman is still sitting in my seat, and 27 years later, I still smile at her. Although we decided much earlier, we had to wait a few years for the date of our wedding to fall on a Saturday. We were married on April Fools’ Day, 2006.

33. Please tell me your love story, about that special person(s) with whom you share(d) your life.

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Marriage hasn’t been easy for either of us, neither has life for that matter. I have had to take the “in sickness and in health” vow very seriously. Three short weeks after we started dating, Jill was the victim of a horrible automobile accident that has left her in constant severe pain to this day. This has made life very challenging for her and for me as her primary caregiver. I just don’t give up on people, and I remain here for her always. Love to me means being willing to selflessly sacrifice part of my life for those whom I care about. It also means being willing to put up with their s--t, but that's another matter.

34. How much and how do you love your special person(s)? What does love mean to you?

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I always love to get together with friends at a party or to visit with family members at a family gathering. Sometimes I get right in the middle it, and sometimes I go off to the side somewhere talking to someone one on one, and sometimes I just stand off quietly to watch the action, enjoying the scene. My late brother Dave used to get right in the middle, telling jokes and funny stories, brother Gary is a bit quieter but still outgoing, and my late oldest brother Bob could be animated when stoked by a shot or two of what he called Airplane Fuel – Jack Daniels whiskey. The mix of personalities among my friends together led to wonderful parties as well.

35. Do you have some memorable personality traits that come out when you are together with family or friends?

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We would tell stories about ourselves, remember, and recount the adventures and misadventures we had taken together. Sometimes we told the same story over and over again; they were favorites, often uproariously funny, and most all of us enjoyed hearing them again.

36. I would love to hear your stories – I’m sure you have a lot of them, including your favorites. Please, do tell, and take your time. I’m all ears, listening eagerly.

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When one of your friends is watching you walk up to them, say, for example, your friend might see you walking in the distance, perhaps a block away or over on yonder hill. As you approach and come clearly into their view and earshot, they recognize that this person is you. What made them recognize you? Is it something in the way you move? Your stature? Your clothing and accessories? A sound you might make, or something you might say when you recognize them?
Sometimes I recognize a friend from a distance by particular gestures he or she might make. I have a dear friend of Italian descent who always gestures with his hands and arms while he speaks, and he is something of a motormouth, constantly talking and joking. He never shuts his mouth! I have always told him that the only way I could shut him up would be to tie his hands behind his back.
As for me, I’ve been known to use the 1-finger salute more than I should, a habit that was not helped by my late mother-in-law, who had a sharp and somewhat bristly personality, cussed like a sailor, and had an entire repertoire of gestures that would indicate her state of mind. Don’t get me wrong, she was quite loveable if not always charming, and she was quite fun to be around.

37. Can you describe how your friends recognize you from a distance, and do you have any particular gestures, obscene or not, or something else that you might do that tells others that you are, well, you?

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My Mom whistled all of the time when I was a child, and when I heard that whistling on our front porch, I knew she had arrived back home. My friend and actor client Charles Gunning would announce his arrival by gently kicking at the bottom of my door with his steel-toed Doc Marten shoes – there was no doubt that it was him knocking on my door.

38. What gives away that it is you arriving somewhere, at home or elsewhere – how do your families or friends know it is you and not someone else? Is it a greeting or verbal expression, sound of voice, or can your family and friends tell -- without seeing you -- by the manner in which you enter the room?

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“And so forth on the stuff in there . . .” These are words that my Dad, Palmer Evans, used to say while his brain was arranging what he was going to say next. As the gears in our minds spin up the next things said in conversation, we often, and often quite mindlessly, say words or make sounds -- um, er, like, you know, bless your heart, or my dad’s “and so forth on the stuff,” and for a longer pause, “and so forth on the stuff in there.” My dad’s expression was unique to him, and everyone who knew him recognized that it was Palmer Evans speaking with them. Sometimes this might be a phrase just associated with you, as in my Papa King's "we shoulda done been there"

39. Do you have little things you might say while you are thinking about what you might say next in a conversation, or phrases that are associated with you?

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“Life lessons and values – When I was very young, probably just older than a toddler, I noticed how people are different from each other. My second Mom, Aunt Mary – had rich deep brown skin, not the same color as my own. When I asked this natural curiosity question – either to my Mom or my grandmother, Mama King – one of them told me that people are really like ice cream. We might come in different flavors and colors, but so does ice cream – vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, pineapple, etc. As a little kid, I found this fascinating, and as an adult, I find it rather clever, since what kid doesn’t like ice cream? I have carried this little bit of wisdom with me for all of my life.

40. Were there any things you learned – life lessons and values – that stayed with you all of your life?

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“Honest.” “A man of his word.” “An angel among us.” These are among many short descriptions of the character of people I know. My own would probably be “A Laughing Fool,” since I laugh, smile, see and comment often about humorous things I encounter in my daily life. Obviously there is more to you or me than a word or three can describe, but most of us have a certain trait or quirk that sums us up in a few words.

41. If your friends or family members were to describe the person they know and love in a word or several words, which words would those be?

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42. When you are just talking with family, friends or even people you recently met, what do you talk about?

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43. What do you like to do together with your friends?

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I’m at the age where I have friendships that go back 45 years or more, back to my high school days. My friends Ron, Peggy and David are some of the first friends I made in Austin, and I have dear friends I made during my music career. I enjoy talking to them; we are still the kids we were so long ago, with more wrinkles.

44. Do you have a lifetime of great, often close, friends? Please tell me about your friends, including their names, how and when you met them, what they mean to you, and what you have in common that sustains your friendships.

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Speaking of friends – and family — I’ve had dogs for a large part of my life, from Bonnie, who legendarily followed my brothers towards our property line, but kept looking back at baby me in a basinet under the huge maple tree in our front yard. She is said to have looked at me, then looked at them, then at me again, before returning to me under the tree. Bonnie was a full-sized Collie. She looked like Lassie, and she went to the rainbow bridge in 1964.
My girlfriend now wife Jill had two dogs when I met her, Dewey, a chow-corgi mix, and Dakin, a fluffy red chow-chow who knew she was the Empress of the Universe. Dewey was the master of the dirty look, and he expressed his opinions through the stink-eye. He was a funny, occasionally sly dog who would walk around and around and around the coffee table and casually steal one of your cookies left too close to the edge, nabbing it without breaking stride. The sound of him chewing while padding around the table gave him away. We moved into a place that had a huge pecan tree in the backyard, and Dewey started digging out buried, half-rotten pecans – and eating them. It took us awhile to figure out what was happening, what was causing him to peel the paint off of our walls. Dewey!
Dakin ran everything. She was the alpha to Dewey, twice his size, and with a challenging personality. Dakin, also known as Pig due to her common habit of making a sound somewhere in between a snort and a grunt, did not let me into Jill’s home when we first started dating. She would bark and growl at me – wiggling her tail as if she were happy to see me, but growling at the same time – and would not let me in until Jill told her to stop. That went on for about a month before Dakin recognized that I wasn’t a threat, and she then proceeded to try to kill me – by licking me to death, which she attempted to do every day for the rest of her life.
We added a black chow puppy, a male, to this menagerie, The Dalai Dogma. Dalai came into our lives at 6 weeks old, a cute energetic poof of fur who grew up to be 65 lbs of friendly, well-socialized, and muscular dog. Dewey ignored him as much as possible, but Dakin took Dalai in as if she were his mom. She wasn’t; she was his alpha. We were afraid of losing Dewey, who was getting on in years, but we lost Dakin suddenly in 2001. Dewey lived to almost 18, to 2004. That left Dalai alone.
Dalai graced our lives for nearly 15 years, and he passed on in 2013.
The house seemed empty for the next few months before Jill and I went to look at rescue dogs at the animal shelter, which is where Seamus found us. Seamus is a mix of Irish Terrier and Irish Wolfhound; he has the appearance of a shaggy Pound Puppy toy. Looks are deceiving, though. Seamus is a troubled dog; he was not socialized and appears to have been alternately abused and ignored as a puppy. Then, as an out-of-control young dog, he was abandoned on the streets, and lived as a stray for a few months. His behavior resembles post-traumatic stress.
Seamus became stuck on me from the get-go. It took him several months and daily treat bribes for him to warm up to my elderly mom, and several months more before he warmed up to Jill. This was very frustrating to Jill since she is a genuine pied piper to dogs, but he finally warmed up.
Seamus when he puts aside his feistiness is one of the sweetest dogs I’ve ever had.

45. Do you have pets or a love for animals – cats, dogs or something else? Please tell me about them.

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I inherited my Dad’s attention to detail and his perfectionism. He was a mechanical engineer, and when he made something, he made it as nearly perfect as it could be, and he took his time to do it. I find myself doing that all the time, and quite commonly something that would take an ordinary person a few minutes to accomplish might take me an hour.
I did not inherit Dad’s mathematical prowess, though, although I believe I inherited the intuition that made him great at math, only my intuition applies to English grammar. This might be related more to my Dad’s father, who was a Professor of Law, and his sister, who was a lawyer.
My Mom and her Mom, my Mama King, gave me an appreciation for the simple joys of life, which includes storytelling, humor, and appreciation of music, sound and silence.

46. Do you have personality characteristics, traits or even peculiarities you might have inherited from older family members, and do you think that you might have passed on a thing or two to younger people in your family?

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I love to travel, particularly around the United States by car. I have travelled abroad as well, and I love going to places I’ve only read about in books. I backpacked extensively and did some mountaineering in my youth.
I’ve been all over the world, but there is something about the constant sensory overload of being in Manhattan – New York City – that is special to me. It is probably my favorite city of all – in two-week doses. As I have observed from my many trips to New York, there is nothing quite like the view of the New York City skyline just after take off from La Guardia as it fades behind you.
I am very fond of mountains – the Rockies, the Cascades, and the Sierra Nevada, and have been lucky to have spent a few weeks adventuring in the high wilderness, away from everything.

47. Do you like to travel? Do you have favorite places you like to go?

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I was a caregiver to my parents and to my father-in-law as they got older. I helped my then elderly Mom take care of my Dad, who suffered from an Alzheimer’s type of dementia; Mom at 81 years old was having to look after a two-old who was a shadow of the man she had been married to for more than 50 years. My wife and I moved in with my Mom a few years later; she lived to age 95, and although she enjoyed relatively good health until the end, well, she was in her 90s and could no longer do what she used to be able to do. I was my father-in-law’s caregiver and chauffeur for the last several years of his life; he was not in good health and had several medical appointments per month at the VA Clinic. I truly value these experiences of caring for and learning from older people, and am happy I could help them live out their lives comfortably.

48. Have you been a caregiver, or has someone helped care for you as you became older? Please tell me about what that experience is/was like, and how you felt about it.

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I’ve collected things over the years, much of it junk I’m afraid. I have always had a fascination with railroads, probably dating from when I was a young child. There was an occasionally used branch line of the Pennsylvania Railroad that was in my neighborhood that stopped running when I was about 5 years old. The tracks crossed our driveway street, Hunt Road, about halfway between our house and the main road, Bryn Mawr Avenue. My Dad had an American Flyer “S” gauge rail layout in our basement – the scale is similar to that of a Lionel train, only without the third rail. He later made an HO layout. I started collecting the really small “N” guage trains as a teenager, and still have them -- packed away in a box.
I’ve collected things like Zippo lighters, too, but the collection most important to me consists of music. While my teenage friends were buying music that was popular during the 1970s, I was buying 12" vinyl albums of music I could not hear on the radio, much of it that had not been released in the United States. I discovered some amazing music – the core of my collection is great music most Americans have never heard.
My wife Jill collects all things cow, and there isn’t a view in our home that doesn’t have a cow looking back at me.

49. Do you enjoy collecting things – besides dust?

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FEARS.
Gosh – other than the fear of a big cockroach (a palmetto bug) flying into and landing on me (happened twice), I can’t say I’m afraid of much. I am respectful, though. Don’t accidentally sit on an ant mound, watch out for brown recluse spiders and for that cottonmouth swimming aggressively towards you. I worry about climate change – I learned of it while in college in 1982 when I wrote a research paper about disappearing rain forests. and noticed a subtle increase in temperature observations from statistics that dated from the 1940s to the late 1970s. I have witnessed also the once semi-arid part of Texas surrounding Austin change into more of a humid, almost sub-tropical climate. A 105 degree day in 1972 Austin was much more comfortable than it is now -– perspiration evaporated quickly, cooling the skin. 105 in Austin today resembles Houston – imagine walking through a wet wash cloth; you sweat and your skin stays dripping wet. I don’t know if humanity is up to the task of confronting this challenge, and I fear that we are not.
I acknowledge the misfortune of having had a broad education, and I come to an understanding of much that I probably should be afraid of.
But fears are real, and in the scheme of things, there is no shame in having them. We all get scared sometimes.

50. What (if anything) might you be afraid of?

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Our faiths often define us, and they guide us through our lives. My grandmother Mama King grew her immense faith in Jesus in part due to losing several of her children at a very young age.

51. Is your faith a guidepost to your lives, and do you live in accord with your faith?

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52. Is there something I might not have asked about you that you think is important to share?

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53. If you knew you had five minutes left in your life, and were with your family and friends, what do you think you would you say to them?

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