BALDY'S
I can clearly remember the moment I heard President Kennedy was assassinated. I just got dropped off at school after lunch and was about ten feet from the flagpole when two or three of my friends ran up and told me. Small groups of kids were standing all around talking about it. That's about all I remember. Other than old news footage I have seen since then, I don't remember anything else about those days. My Mom was real sick and died a week after the assassination. One week before I turned fifteen. She almost died in childbirth when left unattended and her lungs collapsed following an epidural. My Dad could be heard over the whole second floor cursing the doctor and telling him to get the hell over there. She recovered by my baby sister was stillborn. After that my Mom got asthma which led to emphysema. She and my Dad were Camel smokers and they both quit cold turkey, but she could never overcome all the problems from the collapsed lungs. Her name was Frances but everyone called her "Dodo" like the goofy bird. She was always saying funny things and sometimes acting a little bit crazy. The Mexican cowboys on the ranch where she grew up called her "Poco Bueno", which basically means "pretty good".
My Dad knew early on she was dying, but never let on to us kids. He set up a trust fund for us, and for it to become final she had to live past a certain date. She did, but barely. She held on and died within a week or two beyond the date certain. I think it was the death of John Kennedy that killed her spirit and she gave up. My Dad voted for Nixon, and although my Mom was a Republican, she liked Kennedy and I always had the feeling that she voted for him. It was during the week between Kennedy's death and hers that everything is fuzzy. We didn't go to church, but I had begun praying for her almost a year earlier. She couldn't sleep laying down any more so set slept on a couch in the living room having to sit halfway up. Some nights at our lake house I would stay up with her late watching the stars. She had died some time during the early morning hours November 29, 1963.
Several months later the IRS began trying to break the trust. They worked very hard, but my Dad used a very good attourney when he set it up. I can remember after months of negotiations several IRS guys with big satchels came to meet my Dad and his attourney at our lake house. They left without getting what they wanted. Then they began auditing him every year. Sometimes they would find little things in their favor, but his CPA could usually find stuff in his favor, but they kept it up year after year. Finally, in the early 70's he filed a harrassment suit against the IRS claiming that the audits were in retaliation for not breaking the trust (which they stilled poked around in from time to time). After that, I can't remember him ever being audited again.
There were a lot of flowers at the funeral, and there were so many of one kind that Baldy planted them in the road front flower bed. Whoever heard of planting potted flowers outside in December? But that's what Baldy did, and this is one of the first pictures I took with my new Kodak Instamatic camera. Those flowers flourished in the spring and filled the whole flowerbed. That's really all I can ever remember that was planted there.
I have to break off here so I don't get timed out. This doesn't pertain to boat racing at this point, but it is relevant to how we ended up getting into racing so I am giving some background. Hope that's O.K.
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