I knew I could count on Ralph. Yep, always. I, and others, could happily and mischievously count on him. I was a little younger than Ralph. In the beginning, I would follow him, he had a knack for making life more exciting. He regularly found or invented interesting stuff to do. And there was always so much to do; but, alas, never enough time; walking to school or back home (when we absolutely had to do so), often going through a creek looking for and catching water skippers or crawdads; crashing into piles of leaves; later bundling up to build snow forts for some serious snowball fights; playing football and other sports with no helmets or pads, discussing and solving weirdness about people and the world. We would journey out looking for fun and adventure. A little risk or possible endangerment couldn’t stop us. That was just icing on a good time cake. Sometimes we would test out what we could get away with. That taught us how far we could take it and occasionally taught us what we should probably bypass or avoid in the future. Those were different times. We would hitchhike a lot around the St. Louis area and beyond. Possibly it was safer then. Possibly it wasn’t but we did not have the advantages of overabundant mass communication to alert us to the likely dangers. We must have been lucky. I grew up with my brother, who also happened to be my best friend. He was older so he started driving first and I’d ride along with him. We learned that parties changed a lot as you got older (no complaints there). At last, it was time to push boundaries and Ralph had real talent there. To be young in those days, that was special. There were so many concerts and other events to attend. We saw The Rolling Stones, The Doors, The Who, Alice Cooper, and so on; so many. For each event, there were associated good times; preparing for it with friends beforehand or reliving it with friends after. Then a miracle happened, I could drive too. Thus began the fantastic road trip era! We each loved to drive. Make no mistake, Ralph was a world class, excellent driver. Sure he had a tendency to be fast, but more important as a driver he was smart, quick, aware, and smooth. Lots of trips helped us fill our time, sometimes just down to the local hangouts, now and again across various parts of the country. For instance, one time we went to visit our other brother in Oklahoma and chose to drive back across Texas on an allnighter when we were both exhausted and had to trade off driving quite often to keep just enough awake. Of course we had an excellent collection of cassettes we regularly created to keep the best tunes flowing through all the rides. It was always the navigator’s duty to set-up and change the tapes.

I knew I could count on Ralph. Yep, always. I, and others, could happily and mischievously count on him. I was a little younger than Ralph. In the beginning, I would follow him, he had a knack for making life more exciting. He regularly found or invented interesting stuff to do. And there was always so much to do; but, alas, never enough time; walking to school or back home (when we absolutely had to do so), often going through a creek looking for and catching water skippers or crawdads; crashing into piles of leaves; later bundling up to build snow forts for some serious snowball fights; playing football and other sports with no helmets or pads, discussing and solving weirdness about people and the world. We would journey out looking for fun and adventure. A little risk or possible endangerment couldn’t stop us. That was just icing on a good time cake. Sometimes we would test out what we could get away with. That taught us how far we could take it and occasionally taught us what we should probably bypass or avoid in the future. Those were different times. We would hitchhike a lot around the St. Louis area and beyond. Possibly it was safer then. Possibly it wasn’t but we did not have the advantages of overabundant mass communication to alert us to the likely dangers. We must have been lucky. I grew up with my brother, who also happened to be my best friend. He was older so he started driving first and I’d ride along with him. We learned that parties changed a lot as you got older (no complaints there). At last, it was time to push boundaries and Ralph had real talent there. To be young in those days, that was special. There were so many concerts and other events to attend. We saw The Rolling Stones, The Doors, The Who, Alice Cooper, and so on; so many. For each event, there were associated good times; preparing for it with friends beforehand or reliving it with friends after. Then a miracle happened, I could drive too. Thus began the fantastic road trip era! We each loved to drive. Make no mistake, Ralph was a world class, excellent driver. Sure he had a tendency to be fast, but more important as a driver he was smart, quick, aware, and smooth. Lots of trips helped us fill our time, sometimes just down to the local hangouts, now and again across various parts of the country. For instance, one time we went to visit our other brother in Oklahoma and chose to drive back across Texas on an allnighter when we were both exhausted and had to trade off driving quite often to keep just enough awake. Of course we had an excellent collection of cassettes we regularly created to keep the best tunes flowing through all the rides. It was always the navigator’s duty to set-up and change the tapes.