1947—
    I was born October 29, 1947 at Charleston Memorial Hospital.  Dad and Mom had lived their first married years at her mother’s place, the “old home place”, at 2000 Orchard Avenue in the community of Witcher located in the east end of Belle.  But by the time I was born, Mom and Dad had been married a little over five years, Dad had been to Europe and back in the WW2 army, and they had bought a little matchbox house at 2415 Monroe Ave. in St. Albans in a subdivision known as Highlawn.
    Dad knew his way around hand tools and woodworking, and he spent a lot of time at Weimer’s Lumber Yard in Downtown St. Albans.  George C. Weimer later sold the business to the Lantz family, and for a while it was hard for me as a little boy to remember that Weimer’s was now Lantz Lumber.  What a treat it was to climb in the 1950 Chevy with Dad and ride down to Weimer’s to buy lumber for a project! 
    Before I was born, he’d already built a bedstead for their “big” double bed.  This was no small headboard.  It was a pair of cabinets maybe two feet wide, two feet deep, and three feet tall, one on each side of the bed, with doors in front that could be easily opened from the bed.  These were connected by a table a foot wide with a faceboard that extended from the tabletop shelf down behind the pillows handout of sight behind the mattress and springs.  The whole affair became a big, C-shaped, wraparound cabinet with the mattress and springs tucked into the cee and the doors on either side.
    Sometime when Pat (born 14 Feb 1951) and I were very young, Dad built box beds (about 3' x 6' x 16" in my memory) for our red plastic mattresses to lie on.  Each bed contained a drawer on the side about 3 x 3 x 10" for our toys.  He also built a toy chest


1948—

1949—One of my earliest memories is looking out the front window of our house on Monroe Avenue at our new church, Highlawn Baptist, sticking up behind the Soutars' house across the street.  I could see someone, a worker, standing on a tall ladder that extended from the alley behind Soutars' and the church to the attic vent at the top of the church building.  The worker was up there near the church's roof, and I suppose he was installing that vent. 

1950—
    Another delight for me in the evenings after bath was to lie on Mom’s and Dad’s bed in my pajamas and listen to my favorite programs on the General Electric AM radio.  “WHEAT Chex! And RICE Chex! And gooooood, hot Ralston!  PreeeZENT: SPACE PATROL!”  Another favorite began with the William Tell Overture as “Silver”, “Scout”, and silver bullets brought the Lone Ranger and Tonto into the evening for another half-hour adventure.
    Our telephone number back in these days was 1598-W—not fifteen ninety-eight W, but one-five-nine-eight-double-U.   Mom and Dad made me memorize it, and now, seventy-plus years later, I still know it.  And somewhere along here, the City of St. Albans changed to a different street numbering system, and our address at 2415 Monroe became 2304 Monroe Avenue, so I had to rememorize that.
    Our cousins, the Methenys—Mom’s youngest sister Bennie, my uncle Tom, and their crew: Jim, Judy, Janie, and baby JoJo (Jenny wasn’t born yet)— lived in a Quonset hut next door to us and across the vacant lot.  Cousin Janie was a year older than I, but neither of us could speak very clearly yet.  For example, she pronounced her L’s like Y’s and her J’s like D’s, and I pronounced my J’s like L’s.  One day Janie came walking into our house laughing her head off.  Mother asked her what was so funny.  Janie, still laughing, managed, “YISSEN to DONNIE callin’ DOODY LOODY!” 


1951—SPG SEM—I have a photo of me standing next to the bed in Mom's and Dad's bedroom with newborn Patrick Forsythe Gwin lying in his crib.  On the back it says it was taken by Earl Benton, one of the three Daily Mail photographers (the other two being Ray Wheeler and Chet Hawes) shortly after Pat's 14 February birthday.

1951—SUMMER Session—I believe this must have been the summer I learned to strike matches.  Two things resulted.  When Mom and Dad had bought the house that became 2304 Monroe Avenue, they had also bought the vacant lot next door at 2302.  They never built on it, but the former owners had built a little shed there, and Dad used it to contain flammable liquids--paint, turpentine, old rags, etc.  The problem was that there was no lock on it, and I, small boy who knew how to strike matches, somehow got a fire started there that burned down the little shed.  Fortunately, no one was hurt, and the shed was never rebuilt.  But they let a local high-school boy--maybe Vic Quinnette--set up a sawdust pit there with steel vertical poles where he practiced his pole vaulting.  After Vic graduated, dad planted a black walnut there that grew into a small tree.  He transplanted it several years later to our new back yard at 7 Keiffer Drive where it continued to thrive into a large, mature black walnut tree.  He grew two other large trees on the 7 Keiffer property, too, and in his later years, he cracked and shelled hundreds of black walnuts, freezing some of the nutmeats, giving away packages of others to walnut-loving friends for Christmas, right up until they moved with us to New Mexico in the fall of 1999.

1951—FALL SEMESTER—I also have photos of Mom and Jeannie walking Pat down the sidewalk on Monroe Avenue and at Kanawha Airport.  We went up to Kanawha Airport several times--perhaps quite often--in those early years, because I loved to watch the planes coming in and taking off.  Dad would let me ride on his shoulders so I could see better.

I didn’t know it then, but a few blocks away on Lincoln Avenue in St. Albans, a little girl was born September 28, 1951 named Sharon Lynn Hamrick, who, 24 years later would become Mrs. John Gwin!

1952—Spring semester:

    Dad had been working for the Charleston Daily Mail newspaper for about ten years, less the time he was in the service.  After he got out, they bought the little two-bedroom cracker box at 2415 Monroe Avenue in the Highlawn subdivision of St. Albans, about 13 miles down the river from Charleston.  Since they owned no car yet, Dad rode the bus to and from work five days a week.  After they bought the little 1952 black Chevy coupe, Dad could drive it to work and back every day.  One evening Mom needed to drive over to the store for something but came back into the house asking where the car was.  Dad had forgotten the car in the parking lot at the Daily Mail and had ridden the bus home!  But no problem—he just rode the bus to work the next morning and drove the car home that night.  I guess Mom had walked to the store and back that evening.
    One of Dad’s responsibilities at the paper was to cover the St. Albans City Council meetings each month.  After Pat was born, he’d take me with him to those evening meetings, and I’d entertain myself by drawing pictures on extra pieces of Dad's copy paper using those big yellow copy pencils.  He always carried several pieces of paper and several large, yellow, sharpened, eraserless pencils with him in his jacket pockets wherever he went so he could always be ready to take notes on any event he might encounter.  He'd use those notes to write his columns for the paper.  The pencils had the brand name “Veriblack” on the side, but we always just called them “Daily Mail pencils”.


SUMMER Session—

FALL SEM—I was still four years old when I started kindergarten at Mrs. Parr’s.  We met in the basement of the brand new Highlawn Baptist Church.  One of my memories of those days was dipping my finger in one of the small jars of white paste we were using for a project and eating little bits of the paste.  It had a unique flavor that I can still taste in my mouth when I stop to think about it.

1953—SPRING SEMESTER

1953—SUMMER Session—

1953—FALL SEMESTER

    I started grade one at Highlawn Elementary School—Mrs. Lillian Moore was my teacher.  Highlawn was located a block east of us and a short block south.  Of course, one could walk another short block and go in the front gate on Kanawha Terrace, but the gates on the Walnut Street side made walking all the way around unnecessary.  As you walked in the double front doors to the school, Mrs. Moore's room was at the top of the half flight of stairs on the right. To the sides of the stairs were duplicate stairs down—the other half of the flight.  The rest rooms were at the bottom—boys to the left, girls to the right--and there were several other classrooms down there, too, as well as a large assembly room where several classes could meet together to watch a movie and where the PTA met once a month in the evening.  Two of the movies I remember watching in those early days were one on bicycle safety and "An Incident at Owl Creek Bridge".   I have no idea how the latter fit into the curriculum!
    The school was a three-story brick building facing south toward Kanawha Terrace.  It was set back quite a ways from the Terrace, maybe eighty to a hundred feet.  The school grounds were completely surrounded by an eight-foot chain link fence, but I don’t remember the gates ever being closed.  I imagine, however, that they were chained and locked nightly.  A row of Sycamore trees lined the south fence along the Terrace.  We kids could get in trouble by picking up the round sycamore seed balls.  The ones not yet ripe were hard as rocks and were no-no’s because kids could throw them at others and hurt them.  Later in the season, the ripe ones would fall apart and distribute millions of airborne seed puffs that would float all over and make a general mess of the landscape, so they were also no-no’s for us kids. 

     Across the Terrace from the front gate to the school grounds was Youngs’ Store.  The bus stop was there: Young’s store side if you were going UP the road toward Charleston, school side if you were going into downtown St. Albans.  Mom always told us we were related to the Youngs somehow.  I later learned that Mom’s maternal grandmother was Fannie Young who married George Washington Stanley and lived up at Tad out Campbell’s Creek where Aunt Maude lived while I was growing up.  But today, some sixty years later, having continued Uncle James Gwin’s and Cousin Roscoe Keeney’s genealogical studies since 1994, I still don’t yet know just how I am related to old Mr. and Mrs. Young who owned the store in Highlawn across Kanawha Terrace from the school!  It was an old building in those days, and there were curtained rooms behind the counter where customers were not allowed to enter.  I got the impression that these were rooms in their home, and that they seldom if ever left the premises, living and working there day in and day out.

    If you walked parallel to the Terrace along the fence under the Sycamores, there was the ball field, with the sidewalk and Kanawha Terrace right across the fence and home plate there in the southeast corner.  Many a quick game of softball was played there during recess or on the lunch hour.   A creek flowed north from under the Terrace and down the east side of the fence but outside the school grounds. 
    Across Kanawha Terrace from home plate and a bit farther up the Terrace was Jarretts’ Garage, a Gulf station owned by David Jarrett’s dad.  David was my age, and they lived next door to Ben Edwards on Washington Ave.  David had a younger brother—I think his name was Alan—who was about Pat’s age, as I recall.
    Across the creek from the school grounds and across the Terrace from Jarretts’ was the Byrd and Davis hardware store—the B and D Hardware.  Max Davis’ dad owned part of the store.  Like David Jarrett, Max was our age.  They and I were in the same class at Highlawn.  Max died when he was in junior high, I believe.  Roger Casey and I bought Max’s American Flyer S-gauge train set, board and all, from Mr. Davis for twenty dollars after he died.
    Continuing around the playground, there wasn’t much to do out in the northeast corner of the school grounds, and I didn’t go out there much.  Seems like I recall kids getting into trouble who went out there, and I just didn’t go.  So the fence continued west from the creek going across the back of the schoolyard lot to the sidewalk along Walnut Street, then went south along Walnut back to the Terrace.

    When you walked into the front doors at the school, the boys’ restrooms were down a half flight of stairs to the left and the girls’ to the right.  And straight ahead were the steps, maybe eight or so of them.  Climbing them to the second floor, Mrs. Keadle’s (I think that’s how you spell it--it was pronounced KAY-dull) room was to the left.  She taught another first grade class.  Mrs. Moore’s room was to the right.  Farther down the hall was the third first-grade class, Ms. Miller’s.  I don’t remember her at all. 
     I loved Mrs. Lillian Moore.  She was a dear lady.  Mom and Dad had already taught me to read, so I ended up in the Readers’ Circle during reading class while she spent most of her time in the other circles with those who were still struggling with their words.  Opening Exercises started each morning’s activities and always included a prayer and the saying of the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag.  We learned The Pledge twice that year, because sometime that fall, I believe, the phrase “under God” was added to it, and it took us a little while to remember to say it that way.
    A few years later, when I was in high school, I would meet and take classes with Barbara Moore, my teacher’s daughter who was our age but may have gone to another grade school, because they lived farther down the Terrace in St. Albans.
    Being sent to the principal’s office was usually a good thing, because someone had to carry the attendance report there each morning after opening exercises.  You’d walk out Mrs. Moore’s door and turn right up the wooden-floored hallway to Mr. Wes Morris’ office.  The principal was a most interesting man.  He smoked a pipe, and I always loved smelling its smoke whenever I was around him.    He’d lost his right hand and most of his forearm as a young man in an accident, having gotten it caught in some machinery.  And he always wore a tweed suit with the sleeve neatly pinned just below his elbow.  But the way he’d learned to use his left hand in conjunction with the stub of his right arm was nothing short of incredible.  He could do just about anything—deal and play cards, even drive a standard.
    The Morrises were not only friends professionally but also long-time family friends, and while this was his last year as our principal before he retired, I still got to know them well.  Wes and Mahala lived out Coal River and had three kids.  Bob was the oldest, several years older than Sam, who was my age and my buddy.  Betsy was a few years younger than Sam.  I loved it when our family went out to their house “on the river”, because they had so many things on the walls, including a real coo-coo clock with weights hanging on chains that had to be adjusted once a day.  Pulling down on one of those weights was how you wound the clock.

1954—SPRING SEMESTER
    One afternoon, just as the four of us were sitting down to dinner, Mom glanced out the dining room window and saw the Morris’ car approaching the stop sign at the bottom of the newly paved Vine Street hill maybe a couple of hundred feet away.  “Oh, I told Mahala to bring the family over for dinner!” she said to my dad.  “Quick.  Pull the table out and set it for five more.  Johnny, get the chair from the sewing machine.  I’ll get the food…”  By the time the Morrises came in the door a minute or so later, she and Dad had added several cans of food to the serving dishes and cut the meat into smaller but still adequate pieces, and the table, now set for nine, was very presentable.  That was the way Mom did things: fast and efficiently.  And I guess the Morrises never knew just how close they’d come to being “forgotten”.
    Wes loved his beer, and one night after we were all asleep in bed, our phone rang, and Dad groggily answered it.  It was Wes.  He and some friends were up playing Scrabble, and he wanted Dad to use our big unabridged Merriam-Webster’s dictionary to see how to spell a word.  I imagine the several beers Wes had already downed helped him justify getting Adrian and Dot up after midnight to look up a word!
    Wes retired at the end of that year, and Miss Frances Notter accepted the position to replace him.  She was the sister of my third grade teacher, Miss Emma Wood, and she remained the Highlawn Elementary principal until well after I finished sixth grade and had moved on.


1954  SUMMER SESSION—

    We had driven two new cars before the 1954 Plymouth.  Both were black two-door Chevy coupes, a 1950 and a 1952.  So when they bought their first four-door car, a forest green 1954 Plymouth station wagon, Mom had driven it up to Lionel and Mary Gray's new house on Sweet Acres Dr. to visit with Mary for some reason or other.  The Grays had been our neighbors on Monroe Ave., and the visit lasted a while.  When Mary walked her out of the house, it was dark, and Mom had walked around the back of the car to get in, still talking to Mary the whole time.  They said their goodbyes, and Mom got in and reached for the steering wheel.  It was gone!  Then she realized that in the dark, she had gotten into the new car's back seat.  They all had a great laugh about that for a long time to come.

    I believe this was the summer we drove to New England.  Mom and Dad had bought the new station wagon, and they'd decided they were going to take Pat and me to all 48 states and visit all 48 state capitals and their capitols before we got out of school.  Since Mom was a teacher and had the summer months off, and Dad could take a couple of weeks' vacation then as well, they'd decided we could take summer trips to explore our country.  Furthermore, as a member of the National Education Association, Mom had volunteered to help represent Kanawha County and West Virginia at the NEA's week-long national convention, held that summer in New York City.  Since Mom had the summers off and NEA was paying for her travel, meals, and lodging, they decided to start this project by getting the New England states out of the way.  We likely took in Washington, D.C. and at least part of New York City.  But we definitely spent a week at the convention, then drove through Trenton, New Jersey and Dover, Delaware; Hartford, Connecticut; Providence, Rhode Island; and Boston, Massachusetts; Augusta, Maine;  Concord, New Hampshire; and Montpelier, Vermont.  We may even have gotten to Albany, New York and Annapolis, Maryland.  All of that is fuzzy in my mind, though, except for Dad's slide collection and our other photos from the scrapbooks Mom pieced together over the years that followed.

    To complement that trip, Dad had made us a puzzle map of the United States by gluing a large U.S. road map to a piece of quarter-inch plywood and covering it in shellac.  Then, using a large-bow coping saw, he carefully separated the states into the puzzle pieces, and voila, we had a puzzle we could put together and learn all the states.  It was too big to work on a table, so we'd dump out the box of pieces onto the floor and put them together there.  By the end of that year, I could recognize all 48 states by their shapes and knew where they were in relation to all the others!   And due to Mom's diligence in making a game out of all learning, I could also spell all the states and their capitals correctly by the time I was in second or third grade.  It took Pat a little longer, of course, but by helping him put the puzzle together, it cemented into my own mind where all the states were.  The best way to learn is to teach, they say.
    Much later, in my second year of teaching (1975-76) I recognized that my own class of sixth graders did not have that knowledge yet, so I did the same thing.  I bought a sheet of plywood, some glue, shellac, brushes, and small blades for my little power jigsaw, and using a newer AAA map, I made another puzzle.  Kids who finished their work early could go to the back of the room, dump the pieces out onto the floor, and practice assembling the country correctly!  I still have both puzzles.

1954--FALL SEMESTER

    I have three specific memories regarding Mrs. Dorothy Vansickle, my second grade teacher at Highlawn.  First of all, she attended Highlawn Baptist Church, at least in later years.  Second, when we were writing original poetry in her class, I wrote down and handed in the words of a poem Dad had taught me and I’d memorized, “The Spider and the Fly”.  I was sure she’d never heard of it, because my dad had written it, or so I assumed.  Mrs. Vansickle gave it to Mom, and boy did she ever light into me for cheating and lying!  The last thing I remember about her class is that Mom took me out of school early one afternoon so we could ride the bus to Charleston and see a movie together, A Man Called Peter, a biography of Peter Marshall.  We caught the bus at Young’s Store across the street from the school and caught the matinee in Charleston an hour or so later.


1955—SPG SEM—

1955--SUMMER Session—

1955--FALL SEMESTER
I started grade three at Highlawn in Miss Emma Wood's class
Val. Day—homemade card from Jan Russell Snyder, “I wish that I could marry the boy with the grin, so I could be Mrs. Gwin.”
Drawing self portraits.  Learning cursive—hated the capital Gees and Bees
Being sick and missing a week of school
Miss Wood pitching at our softball games


1956—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—started grade 4 at HES—Mrs. Casto

1957—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—started grade 5 at HES—Mr. Gerald Perry
It was the year that the schools decided to only teach us a half day.  We arrived at school at the regular time, I presume, and stayed until lunch dismissal, which was the end of our day.  Then I walked to the Dunlaps' house with Cindy, who was in our class.  Perhaps the others of us went, too--Dave, Doug, and Robin (Cindy's siblings) and Pat, my brother. 

At the Dunlaps', we got to watch Queen for a Day and Truth or Consequences, then Helen called us to lunch.  Then we'd go outside and play ante-over by throwing a rubber ball over their house, or if weather didn't allow us to go out, there were plenty of things to do inside, such as watching their Slinky work its way down the stairs from the attic.  I'm sure we did other things as well to stay busy and out of Helen's way.  Once when I was petting the cat,

1958—

SPG SEM—

SUMMER Session—

FALL SEM—

    Sixth grade!  We were very excited to be the “Big Ducks in a Little Pond” that year, as our teacher called it, our last year in elementary school.  To make things even more exciting, I was going to have my second male teacher in a row, Mr. Garland Savilla, for home room and for most of my classes. Our other teacher was Mrs. (Lillian, I think) White.  But there wasn’t room at the school for our two classes, so our church, the Highlawn Baptist Church, one block up the street from the school at 2304 Jefferson Avenue, opened its doors to us, and that’s where we went to school all year long.  Mr. Savilla’s class was the larger of the two.  There were over 40 kids in our class and over thirty in Mrs. White’s!
      Every Friday before school was out, we had to put our books away.  A closet at the end of the hall had been lined with shelves for this purpose, and our books were stored in there so the church could use the desks for Sunday school.  Then on Monday mornings, we had to stand in line at the closet to get our books out for the week.
    At recess and lunch hour we’d play four-square on the concrete out in front of the church.   Several of the kids were very good players, and It was a challenge to get them out.  Some of these included Joe Barker, Roger Jatko, and Pete Dyer among others.  Many of us would get tired of trying and would sit and talk instead. 
    Somewhere in there I was staying at Billy Craigo’s house one evening.  The Craigos went to our church and lived on Washington Ave.   Billy taught me to play chess that night.  I’ve been a fan of the game ever since, being a member of the chess club in high school and serving as sponsor of several chess clubs at different schools where I taught in later years.
    Mr. Savilla smoked, as did my dad, but I didn’t learn that he smoked until much later in the year when I saw him coming in one of the back doors to the church from the alley during a break.  I asked him where he’d been, and he told me he’d been taking a cigarette break.
    Christmas of 1958 was the year Pat and I got our American Flyer electric trains.  Dad had upgraded the attic of our ittlle house at 2304 Monroe Ave. to include a pull-down stairway in the hallway, 5/8"-plywood sheet flooring in the attic, which ran from the fron of the house all the way to the back, and 1x6 tongue-and-groove 8' boards up the sides and across the ceiling.  His work bench was up there, and Mom used it to hang the clothes in bad weather.  Pat and I received permission to tack our train tracks to the floor, and when he grew tired of his train set, he sold his to me.  Then I found out Roger Casey, who was a year ahead of me in school, Also had an American Flyer train, and he brought his down to the house and added it to mine.  Now we had THREE trains and LOTS of track, and roger and I started the Casey and Gwin Lines Railroad.  Anne Jackson heard about it and gave us her grown son John's AF set, and we had quite the layout in our attic, nailed to the floor in the south end of the attic.


1959—

Spring Semester

    The newspaper for which Dad worked, the Charleston Daily Mail, sponsored a “Europlane” trip that spring.  A planeful of interested people from the Kanawha Valley bought tickets to fly to and all over Europe for what must’ve been at least a week or maybe two.  A guide went with them to lead the tour, and the paper paid for Dad to go along and write articles about the exciting places they visited.  Mother wanted to go, too, but Dad told her there was no way they could afford for her to go.  So when he returned, Mom had bought a complete bedroom suite that cost a little more than the trip ticket would have cost.  And no, Mom was not as much vindictive as she was stubborn when she knew she was right.
    That was the year that a swarm of honey bees had taken up residence for a couple of days in the silver poplar tree in our back yard.  We lived at 2304 Monroe Avenue, right behind and across Monroe from the church (located at 2304 Jefferson Ave.), and Dad told me to tell Mr. Garland Savilla about the swarm, and did he want to bring us all down to see it?  So he walked the entire sixth grade, some 80 of us, for a little spur-of-the-moment field trip out of the church, down Vine St. hill, and over to our house to see the swarm.  Most of us had never seen bees swarming, and for me, it was the only time I’ve ever seen such an event.  It was amazing to me that none of us got stung.  But my dad and my teacher both told us that honeybees wouldn’t sting you unless they felt like you were going to cause them harm.  Nevertheless, we stayed at least a respectable 100 feet or so away to watch the swarm.
    Another field trip that year occurred late in the spring and was much more organized was a hike to the St. Albans City Park for lunch.  The park was only a little over a mile from the church, but with seventy kids, it was a pretty big deal for us. On that hike and during lunch, we traded our almost-totally-used-up work books with each other and signed them, much as one would with annuals or year books if we had had them.  I still had mine years later, but I don’t know now whatever became of it.
    Sixth grade was the year that we got to serve as safety patrol members.  Sixth graders got to wear white sashes with our silver badges pinned to them while we were on duty before and after school.  We'd be on duty at  our assigned street crossings and hold the kids back on the curbs behind us.  Then when there was a break in the traffic, we'd step to the middle of the lane and block traffic while the kids crossed.  We felt very important indeed.  Many of the 6th graders went on the trip to Washington, D.C. sponsored annually by the Safety Patrol.  But parents had to pay quite a bit for their kids to go, and my parents and I chose for me not to go, since I'd already been at least once  to D. C. on summer vacations, the next of which was to happen that same summer, a "round-the-country" trip for which we were saving our money.



SUMMER Session—NEA convention—trip there in the ’57 Chevy 210—where did we go?

FALL SEM—started grade 7 at SHJHS—

Spring Hill Junior High School was located at the south end of the Dunbar Toll Bridge in Spring Hill, the community on Route 60 at the went end of South Charleston.  Mother was the art teacher there, and somehow it was decided that I would attend school there instead of at McKinley JHS in St. Albans.  I don't remember being part of that decision.

But I got up early with Mother and rode with her to Spring Hill every day then back home at the end of the day.

Some of my new friends included John Doyle Daugherty, Bobby Meeks, Jimmy Higginbotham, LeAnn Lette, Starlet Young (who turned out to be a distant cousin, as I recall), Dale Seguin, Tony Woeber, and others whose names I'll  remember and add later.

My seventh-grade teachers were Mr. Cass Carter, home room and science; Mrs. Berry, geography; Mrs. _________, English; Mrs. Blackburn, math; Mr. and the four "electives (nine weeks each): "Miss Samms, music; Mrs. Gwin (my mom), art; Mr. Bright, wood shop; and maybe Mr. Smith, study hall.

1960—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—started grade 8 at SHJHS—

1961—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—started grade 9 at SHJHS—

    I was, as Mr. Savilla had told us three years earlier, once again "a big frog in a little pond."  I was already accustomed to riding to Spring Hill Junior High School every school day with mother.  My classes for the year were as follows:
Algebra One:  Mr. Charles Percy Buxton was a young, single man who drove a foreign sports car convertible--I think it was an MG. I learned everything well in his class, all the concepts, that is.  However, I got many of the answers wrong, not because I didn't understand the concepts but because I'd make simple mistakes in arithmetic, and I hardly if ever bothered to check my work.  For example, I'd be going so fast, trying to finish first, and I'd say three times four is seven, adding instead of multiplying.  And of course, the answer would be wrong.  I made a lot of D's that year in algebra.
English 9:  Mrs. Heiser was the mother of one of our classmates, Libby Heiser, who was a majorette.  Halfway through the year she transferred to WV State College to teach, and a Mrs. Bailey became her permanent sub for the rest of the school year.

Civics:  Mrs. Richardson had a vase of daffodils on her desk. 

Advanced Wood Shop:  Mr. John Bright

Band:  Mr. Alfred Moroni

Other Electives:

Art: Mrs. Dorothy Gwin

Music: Ms. Samms


1962—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—started grade 10 at SAHS—

1963—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—started grade 11 at SAHS—

1964—

SPG SEM—I became a Christian
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—started grade 12 at SAHS—

1965—

SPRING SEMESTER 1965

“The ACT, Pre-ministry, and a New Way to Pray”

    On the prescribed Saturday, Mom or Dad drove me over to WV State College where they were to administer the American College Test or ACT, the exam that most colleges and universities used for entrance and placement of incoming freshmen.  I had filled out the registration forms with Mom beforehand, and we’d marked down to have the results sent to the University of Kentucky, as we’d been communicating and visiting with them for over three years in anticipation of me attending their school of architecture.  The first portion of the ACT was for English, my best subject.  I was determined to do well on it, and I’m still perfectly confident that I made no errors on that section at all—on all of it that I finished, anyway.  I was about halfway through when the gentleman in charge called time and told us to put down our pencils.  I had failed to pay attention to the time and so left quite a bit of the test unattempted.  Sure enough my score in English was quite low—a 13, I believe—requiring me, I would learn later, to take English 100 or “Bonehead” English my first semester.
    We had the results sent to UK, of course, but the ACT recommended having them sent to a second-choice school as well, so I selected Marshall University in Huntington, WV, as the second recipient.  This was primarily due to the fact that I had been meeting with our pastor, LeRoy Keeney, and with several other young men—Frank Meadows and Roger Dills, to name two—who were interested in going into the ministry.  Pastor LeRoy had suggested Marshall to me as a place to get an undergrad degree in history or English before going to seminary.
    So I was confused.  Here I’d been planning on studying architecture at UK since ninth grade.  Then I’d become a Christian, and now this second direction had been placed before me.  Our pastor had sent me, Frank, and Roger to a “conference on the ministry” that was held one weekend at Marshall, but none of us was spiritually mature enough to prosper much from it; nevertheless, everyone at Highlawn Baptist—including our pastor—now assumed we’d all be going into the ministry.
    Meanwhile, our BYF advisor, Betsy Gillian, had the entire youth group read a new book that she’d just seen herself, The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson.  I guess she had purchased copies for us through the church.  We’d read a portion at home during the week, then discuss it at BYF on Sunday evenings. 
    For my part, I had been stunned by the way these men prayed.  Oh, I knew how the pray the Morning Prayer, the Offertory Prayer, and the Closing Prayer at church, and I knew how to use all the proper pronouns for God—Thee, Thou, Thine, and so on.  But I’d never had heard anyone pray like these men did in the book.  One can read the “Teen Challenge History” website at https://teenchallengeusa.org/about/history and get an idea of what they were doing and what we were reading.
    One prayer in particular stands out to me fifty-five years later.  Wilkerson and his friend had arrived in New York City but had no idea how to contact any of the young men in the newspaper and magazine articles they’d been reading.  God had used these media to attract and convince Wilkerson and his friend to leave their church in the Carolinas and “go to New York” to help these gangsters.  So now they’d arrived in New York, and with no clues about where to go next or who to ask, they prayed for God to lead them to one of these young men.  Then they decided to start asking people how to find them.  They parked their car and walked into the nearest tenement building, up several flights of stairs, and down a hallway.  Then they knocked on one of the doors, and when a kid answered it, they held out the newspaper photo and asked if he knew how they could find this young man in the photo.  The kid had said “Just a minute,” and he walked back into the apartment calling the young man’s name.  In a city of millions of people, God had led them directly to the very apartment where the young man lived!
    And so I prayed.  Without telling anyone what I’d prayed—not my pastor, not my parent, not any of my friends—I silently asked God to please get me accepted at the school He wanted me to attend and rejected at the other.  That way I’d know exactly where to go to college and what to study:  UK to study architecture or MU to study  English as a pre-seminary degree.  I said amen and waited.

SUMMER 1965
“The Fleece”

    Graduation came and went, and I was once again off for the summer, my last to be at home with my family.  In just a couple of months, just a few weeks, really, I’d be off to Lexington or Huntington, entirely on my own.
    In just a few days, it seems now, I got a letter from Marshall saying how delighted they were that I had selected their school as one to which to have my “high” ACT scores sent, and they hoped I’d select Marshall to attend.  But now I began to worry.  I had been communicating with UK for several years and had received similar praise from them.  All they were waiting on were my ACT results.  I felt sure I’d be accepted there as well, so NOW how was I to decide? 
    And so I waited some more. But when several additional weeks went by and the deadlines to register for the fall semester got closer and closer, Mom suggested that I call UK and find out what my status was.  So I did.  I made an expensive, long-distance, late-in-the-afternoon call to Lexington, Kentucky. 
    A female voice in the registrar’s office at UK answered, and I told her my plight.  I simply needed to know if I’d been accepted.  “ Please hold, Mr. Gwin, while I get your paperwork.”  And so once again I found myself waiting  some more.  After what seemed like ten minutes she reconnected.  “I’m sorry Mr. Gwin, but your ACT scores are too low, and you’ve been rejected.”
    I was so excited I could barely hang up the phone.  God had answered my prayer!  I almost shouted the news to Mom and Dad, “I’ve been rejected!  I’m going to Marshall!”
    The rest of that week was a blur.  We drove to Huntington, registered at Marshall, and bought the required textbooks for all my classes.  Then we learned that all the dorms were now filled.  They gave us a list of off-campus apartments and rooming houses, but Mom, always the planner, always in search of a “Plan B”, had already asked the parents of my friend Frank for suggestions as to where to look.  And they’d said I could room with Frank in the upstairs bedroom of the older home on Third Avenue they’d found for Frank and split the monthly rent.  We’d share the upstairs bath with the tenant in the other bedroom.  We could buy a meal-ticket book for three meals a day in the school cafeteria.  And it was not even a half-block from campus!  It was finally all settled, and I was very relieved.
    But not Mom.  She had seethed in silence that HER SON had been accepted with high praise at one state-supported institution and REJECTED at another.  It just made no sense to her, and wanting to get to the bottom of things, really just needing to vent, rant, and rave, she had written out her frustrations in a three-page—front and back!—diatribe to the president of the University of Kentucky, had folded the silent tirade into an envelope, and had addressed and mailed it.  I don’t think she even told Dad what she’d done.  I know she didn’t tell me.
    The next week we were sitting at the dining room table finishing dinner when the phone rang, and I answered it.  It was a person-to-person call from Dr. So-and-so, the president of the University of Kentucky, for Mrs. Dorothy Gwin, and was she available? the operator asked.  I said yes and handed Mom the phone.  And Dad, my younger brother Pat, and I listened intently to Mom’s short-answer side of the conversation while she learned, in Paul Harvey’s words, “the REST of the story”.
    Finally she thanked him, told him goodbye, and handed me back the phone, which I returned to its hanger before going back to the table to hear more.  It turned out that the President had gotten her letter in that morning’s mail and had walked down the hall to the registrar’s office to discuss the matter with the registrar himself.  Together they had found the young lady in the office who remembered taking the call from me a week or so earlier.  They had learned from her that she had carefully looked for my file under several possible spellings of Gwin to no avail.    Embarrassed, frustrated, and to save face, she had finally made up the story that I had been rejected.
    She and the president had continued to look and finally discovered the misfiled file in the Q’s under Quinn! Then he had called Mom to tell her the story and to let her know that my ACT scores were indeed high and that I’d be more than welcome to register at UK. 
    But I knew what God had done!  And by the time the president had called, I was already solidly enrolled at Marshall with books purchased, room rent paid, and meal plan secured.

FALL SEMESTER 1965

“The Doorbell”

    I started at Marshall too late to get in the dorms, so I rented an upstairs bedroom at 1835 3rd Avenue with Frank Meadows who had already enrolled.  Frank and his family lived out Coal River, but they were faithful members at Highlawn Baptist, and our families had known each other for years, though perhaps not as well as others.  Frank and I had known each other in Sunday school, and we had attended the Conference on the Ministry at Marshall a year or so earlier.  Mom and Virginia Meadows had discussed my housing situation, and together they planned for me to room with Frank.
    There was a 24-hour bakery and out shop next door to the east of us at 1845; Mrs. Moores’s confectionary was next-door to the west at 1825; and just east of the bakery at 1855 was the ever popular local bar and grill, El Gato, Spanish for “the Cat”.  Almost everyone pronounced it “the GAY-dough”, and because I didn’t drink, it was some time before I noticed the neon sign on the front with the black cat slinking under the name and realized that it should be pronounced more like “GAH-toe”.  
    Our dear old landlady, whose name I can’t now remember, lived downstairs from us.  She had a beautiful light green 1952 Hudson Hornet in the garage out back that she let me drive once for her to go to the supermarket to buy her groceries.  The following year I kept my black bicycle in that garage, too. 
    At first we had a problem with visitors.  If they came over and rang the doorbell, it rang in the landlady’s  downstairs hallway, and she’d have to stop whatever she was doing and answer it, then open the door to our staircase and call upstairs to get one of us.  That was a nuisance for her and an interruption of our privacy for us.  She didn’t have to know who and when people were visiting us!  Soon I had an idea to try to solve this problem. 
    First I bought and drank a half-pint carton of milk from the bakery, then washed it out and put a few bottle caps inside that would rattle when you shook the carton.  Next I tied a piece of black fishing line to the rain downspout that ran from our roof down the corner of the house to the little walk on the east side of our house below our window.  It was almost invisible unless you were looking for it.  From the knot where I had tied it at about eye level, it ran up the side of the house, across the enclosed front porch’s roof, through the window’s screen next to my bed, and under the slightly open window pane.  I ran the line under my bed and tied it to that milk carton in which I’d placed those bottle caps. 
    When it was all ready, Frank ran downstairs to try it out.  He gave a couple of quick, gentle jerks on the line, and sure enough, the unique rattling of the caps in the carton were very audible from anywhere in our room.  We passed the word to our close friends, and never again did we bother our landlady when guests arrived!  Whenever the milk carton rattled, one of us could go downstairs to the front porch and open the outside porch door to let them in.

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“The Shutout”

    Our new acquaintance Leonard Veid occupied the other upstairs bedroom.  He was a quiet man who rather liked to keep to himself whenever he could.  Frank and I, on the other hand, were both outgoing and social.  Whereas we had guests over all the time to play penny-ante poker, occasionally study, and just generally hang out, I don’t believe I ever saw Leonard have a single guest.
    The three of us—Leonard, Frank, and I—shared the upstairs bathroom.  The door latched from the inside, of course, but Frank and I almost never latched it, rather leaving it unlatched in case the other had to come in briefly.  But Leonard always latched it.  And when he went inside and latched it, he might brush his teeth, shave, sit for a spell, and take a leisurely shower—it might be a half hour to even an hour before he came out again!  And when this would happen in the morning, if Frank or I had early classes, we might have to forego our own time inside and stop in a men’s room on the way to class on campus. 
    I’m sure one or the other of us mentioned the problem to Leonard at least once, and while he probably gave our complaints a glib “OK”, the situation continued on into the fall.  Frank and I discussed it from time to time, even when others were visiting, and soon it was a regularly recurring topic in our room.  Finally, a solution began to surface.  We decided that friend would come over and spend the night, sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag.  
    On the appointed day, one of us went into the bathroom early, before Leonard got up.  He took his time and used all the conveniences at least once.  At a pre-arranged minute, the next one of us entered the hallway and knocked once on the door.  Though Leonard was nearby waiting with his Dopp kit and clothes, the first opened the door slightly and exited while the second slipped in and latched the door to start his shift. 
    When the third repeated this procedure to complete the shutout, poor Leonard stomped back to his room, dressed, and left the house, not a little perturbed.  But he got the message.  After that he never latched himself inside for more than ten minutes or so at a time, always putting a little space between visits to give all others their turn.

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“Suitcasing”

    Bob Williams, a SAHS ’64 grad, lived in the little apartment on the east side of Mrs. Moore’s confectionary, and he was a suitcaser.   Most students at Marshall were not, but Bob and many others certainly were.  This was a Marshall term for students who made a habit of going home on the weekends rather than staying on campus and engaging in weekend activities there.  Frank and Leonard were suitcasers most weekends; Steve and I weren’t.
    But Bob had a girlfriend at home, Susie, and they were seriously in love.  It was all he could do to cram all his studying into Mondays through Fridays, because Friday afternoon he was headed for St. Albans.  Bob’s family lived downtown and went to First Baptist Church for worship and youth group, and since he was a year older than I in school, I didn’t know him as well as I did Steve and Frank.  But he’d still come over to our room and share stories from time to time.
    Like the rest of us, Bob didn’t have a car on campus, a must for many suitcasers.  And so whenever he couldn’t find a ride, he hitch-hiked the 37 miles between Huntington and St. Albans.
    One Sunday evening Bob returned to Marshall and came over for a visit.  His weekends were usually uneventful, but this time had been different.  Hitching a ride back to Huntington from visiting Susie, he’d been picked up by a couple of men in a sedan, so he’d hopped in the back. 
    Somewhere along the way, the two had decided to change drivers.  But instead of pulling over, stopping, and walking around like normal, sane folks would, they’d decided to try switching seats without slowing down.  The procedure had proven too difficult at the interstate’s higher speeds, and they ended up in the grassy median, luckily with none of the tires having left the ground and without them having hit anything.  I don’t recall how he said he’d finished the trip, but he said he’d gotten out of the car, thanked them for the ride, and walked away.  He said he was still shaking.

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“The Navigators”

weeklong conference at Massanetta Springs Conference Center, Virginia lots of us went--Check from Bob Jackson to help pay for it!



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“An Early Engagement”
—dating Patsy —diamond ring adventure working as dishwasher at dining hall to pay for it, then as lawmaker at fast food joint on 4th avenue until it was paid for.  Church at CCC—organ on balcony, medley Dixie in minor key toWeShall overcome to It is well with my soul—coffee house, ”Misty”, “Two Blinks and a Blank”, Terry Goller, —Corky King (Presby), Bill Villers (Meth), Dr._Elmer Dierks (Bapt)—to 5th Ave Bapt, youth choir, went on tour stayed in people’s homes in southern WV—walking home Sun Eves after choir—three 15-cent hambs at McDonalds for supper—meal tickets at dining hall—
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“Delbert Society”

Delbert Sellers—     Steve Edington, the ’63 SAHS grad and fellow HBC pre-ministry student, Delbert Society co-founder, and YFC rally attender, lived across the street and down a block my freshman and his junior year.  He also had an upstairs bedroom apartment. 
    Steve is the one who introduced me to the Campus Christian Center Coffee House—more on that later. Delbert Society sweatshirts—Delbert on dessert tickets (Watch for me on you dessert tickets (Hey, I got one—what do I get?  Thanksgiving meal at packed dining hall—SHHHHHH! On the signal—totally quiet for several seconds, then “What was that?”





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“Smokes and M-80s”

 —cigarettes 25cents for pack of 20—Swisher Sweets—Meadows: chewterbacky—penny poker—plaster of Paris in meadows penny jug—Meadows was a suitcaser—match wars using suitcase snaps—lighting farts—cigarette delay fuses for M80 bombs around girls’ dorms during “lineups” before curfews—M80 bomb on metal mayo lid on floor in Edington’s room (“Somebody tried to kill you Edington!)—setting all clocks ahead on Sat night in Edington’s dorm room in dead of winter—walked almost all the way to 5th Ave Bapt ch. in dark before he saw the clock on bank downtown—2:00 a.m.!

1966—

SPG SEM (66)—still upstairs at 1835
SUMMER Session—Youth and Children’s Choir Director at Highlawn Baptist—was that this summer or earlier in high school?
    For some months our scout troop—Troop 50 of Highlawn Baptist Church in St. Albans—had been committed to going to Philmont, the national scout ranch in New Mexico.  We’d been going over what to take, what to expect, how to prepare, and everything else we could think of.  Scouts from our troop were combined with several those of several others in the Buckskin Council, our governing body.  All told, we had fifty scouts and five leaders in our contingent.  We had one last “shakedown” activity before we left so the leaders could see everything we were planning to take—how we had our knapsacks organized, for the most part, and what extraneous things we needed to be sure to leave behind.
    We gathered at the train station in Charleston at oh-dark-thirty one morning in late June.  By the time dawn cracked across the horizon behind us, we were well on our way to Cincinnati where we’d transfer to chartered Greyhounds for Chicago.  There we toured the museum of natural history while waiting to board the train for a little town in southeastern Colorado.  From there more chartered buses drove us over into New Mexico and to the base camp for Philmont. 
    All campers had to spend a day and a night in the base camp to let our bodies acclimate s little to the higher altitude.  Our contingent was divided into five groups of ten scouts each and one adult leader.  Our group was 629J1, which stood for June 29, contingent J, group one (of five). 
    Jim Roberts was our group's adult leader.  I'd known him for years as our troop's scoutmaster who was also my high school Sunday school teacher. He sang a wonderful deep bass in the church choir and in many a duet, men's quartet, and other small groups that might put together a special in church or as a last-minute extemporaneous singalong at a Wednesday night dinner or campfire aftermath.  Jim was also a marine veteran of the Korean conflict.  And as I had just finished my freshman year in college, having served the troop in high school as the senior patrol leader, he chose me to be his assistant.
    On the evening of the fourth of July we'd gone to a "singing cowboy" campfire down the trail from our tents.  Afterward we were walking back someone pointed out a strange satellite in the dusk sky.  We'd seen many satellites in the past from our sleeping bags under the stars travelling their lonesome orbits, but we'd never seen one like this.  It was moving along in an easterly direction at a slow pace as usual, but it was blinking--on and off, on and off.  While it was on, it looked like any other satellite, and when it was off, it was as if it wasn't there--you couldn't see it at all. 
    As we speculated as to what might be causing this--perhaps a rotating part that only reflected the sun's rays when it was rotating on the near side, then showing no reflection at all when it was on the far side of us--it arrived at a spot directly over our heads.  And then the impossible happened.  It stopped.  It stopped and stayed on without blinking.  As we silently watched, it grew brighter than any star in the sky and stayed very bright for several seconds.  And then, as it stayed very bright, suddenly and very rapidly it shot back the way it had come, disappearing over the western horizon in about the space of about one second.
    It was, and is, the only UFO I've ever witnessed.

—went to Massanetta Springs week-long conf

    Several of my new friends had told me how great Navigators conferences were.  I even got a letter from my friend and mentor, Bob Jackson, encouraging me to send in my registration for the big one coming up at the end of summer.  His encouragement included a significantly large cash bill—maybe a twenty.  Regardless, it paid for my registration  It was definitely huge back in the mid sixties.  The Navs’ week-long East Coast Fall Collegiate Conference was scheduled for late summer at Massanetta Springs, Virginia.  Keynote speaker for the week was to be Lorne Sanney, the president of the Navigators, and lower echelon staff from all over the east coast would speak in the mornings and afternoons.  They would include Dwight Hill, Dean Truog, Dave Bradford, and maybe a dozen others whose names I can’t now recall.  Hundreds if not thousands of students would attend.
    One of the things I remember about the conference was that I didn’t hear any cursing, swearing, or off-color jokes for seven days!  THAT was astounding to me.
    From Lorne Sanney’s evening messages, one of the things I remember most vividly him telling us was that we should keep a “Park Page” in our notebooks.  This would be a place to write down everything that didn’t make sense to us at any given moment.  He gave the example of how for decades (if not centuries?) Bible “scholars” had said that since there had never been any scientific evidence, ie., in secular history or archaeology, of a “Hittite” nation, that this proved that the Bible was not true, since it said that the Hittite nation actually existed and spoke of it on several occasions.  Everyone knew that the Hittites were just a figment of Hebrew mythology.  And then one day archaeologists began to uncover new evidence that the Hittites had indeed been a middle-eastern nation of significant size. And today it is an accepted fact.  “Whenever you come across something that is a problem for you like that, just PARK IT on your Park Page,” Sanney had said, “then keep on doing the things that you KNOW God wants you to do.  Sooner or later somebody with a shovel in the Middle East will uncover the answer to your problem!   From time to time you can go back to your page and see what else is still a problem or not.”
    So I decided to try it.  An example from my own “Park Page”, then, relates to the topic of Assurance of Salvation.  Bob Jackson had started me out in Scripture memory with 1 John 5:11-12 on that topic, but every now and then I’d come across a verse that seemed to refute its truth.  So I wrote down in one column every verse I could find that seemed to say Christian’s cannot lose their salvation.  There were many, and from time to time I would find another and add it to the list.  Then in the other column I wrote down every verse I could find that seemed to say Christians COULD lose their salvation.  And every time I would find another, I’d add it to THAT list.  One day I heard a pastor preaching on one of the latter passages, and he explained that what that passage really meant was such and such, and that it didn’t relate to losing one’s salvation at all.  VOILA!  I went to my Park Page and wrote down the solution to that particular “problem passage”.  
    Over the years these discoveries continued, until one day I realized that the very last one of my “problem” passages had been moved to the list on the other side of the page!  And today, I am fully confident that when the Holy Spirit indwells a new believer, He will NEVER LEAVE that person, who now has eternal life—ETERNAL life—which cannot be lost.  One of my favorites of these verses is John 5:24, where Jesus says that all who “hear” and “believe” HAVE eternal life.  The present tense is absolutely correct here in the Greek, proving that believers cannot lose their salvation.  For if I HAVE eternal life now, then tomorrow I commit some sin that makes me LOSE it, then I never had ETERNAL life; I only had ONE-DAY life.  That certainly makes sense to me.  I love it!

    Another of the speakers that week was a Nav staff member, Dwight Hill, who with his new bride, Ruth, were on their way to the Phillipines to serve a four-year term as missionaries.  Dwight's topic for his message that morning was "Guy/Gal Relationships", and he was pretty brutal, it seemed to me, in his attack on the whole issue of casual dating.  As he neared the end of his message, he said that if there was anyone listening who was under the impression he was against marriage, that person should come up after the message and talk to him about it.  It certainly seemed that way to me to me, so I took him up on it.  And so after that meeting I made my way to front and told him so, and he led me to a quieter place where we could speak privately.
    I told him about the girl I'd been dating and asked him what I should do.  His advice to me was to "tell her goodbye, I'll see you in five," meaning that I should make another date with her for five years from now and then spend all my time getting to know God better through His Word and prayer.  When the date arrived five years later, I'd find her and see what God was doing.
    So for the rest of the conference and on the way back to school, I was looking for some private time with her so I could tell her what he had said.  But that time didn't come until one Sunday afternoon back at Marshall when she and I were sitting on the big enclosed, windowed front porch of the house where I was renting a room.  One of my fellow renters was returning from his weekend home, and he looked pretty sad, so as he came onto the porch, I greeted him and asked him what was wrong.  Turned out that he









 






FALL SEM—

Sometime during the summer our landlady who lived downstairs, Mrs. _______, died.  Her brother came down to take care of her estate, and he allowed Frank and me to rent the front section of the downstairs of her house.  Two other fellows, Jerry Horne and Mike Hoh, rented the smaller side section.  There was only one bath room for all four of us.  It had two doors, though, one to their apartment and one to ours.  Whoever was using it had to latch the door to the other apartment and remember to unlatch it when he was through.  There were two kitchens.  Ours was the main one, and theirs was the tiny little kitchenette.
One time I was using the bathroom when I heard what sounded like a cry for help coming from their apartment.  opening their door, I peeked inside, and there lay Jerry, half inside, half still out on the stoop.  He'd been out drinking, and he'd tripped coming in and had fallen, but was too drunk to get himself up.  Further, he had vomited his alcohol onto the floor and couldn't get himself out of the mess.  So I went over and helped him up.  He went to bed in his jeans and t-shirt, telling me not to clean up anything, that he'd do it when he got up.

1967—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—to Hawaii and Alaska, then to Maranatha STP second session
FALL SEM—lived on 20th St. in house with Bryan, McGuire, and Jones—two ladies downstairs—drug store next door where CCC girl worked


1968—

SPG SEM—still living on 20th St. in house with Bryan, McGuire, and Jones—two ladies downstairs
SUMMER Session—to Michigan for 10-wk. STEAM STP
FALL SEM—Lived in Twin Towers dormitory—my room on 2nd floor, Mike Burke upstairs—running the stairs all winter when too cold to run outdoors—leaning pipe against door and knocking, running—clankety clank clank—repeat—

1969—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—Went to summer school for the first time—also first time to make straight A;s all summer—didn’t realize until the fall that I was using my 1S deferment—Bill Bryan, some others, and I painted Judy Cross’ house for her mom who played organ at Walnut Hills Baptist Church where Bill Bryan’s uncle was pastor.
FALL SEM—Bob Barbour and the THICK coffee Ken Bondurant made for Bible Study—

1970—

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HERE’S WHAT I SENT TO MY DLISW FRIENDS DURING COVID19 PANDEMIC in March 2020 WHEN JOHN “CHOPPER” SHANNNON ASKED US TO SHARE BCT EXPERIENCES WITH EACH OTHER:

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“Sovereignty”

    Basic Combat Training started for me in September 1969 at Marshall University.  I’d already burned through my four-year 2S deferment AND my one-semester 1S.  I’d called my draft board and told them so but that I still needed one more class to graduate.  The man told me I’d be drafted that fall but to go ahead and register for that needed class—plus three more to qualify as a full-time student for the fall.  He said to call him again when I got my “greetings”, and he’d grant me a verbal POI—Postponement of Induction—until I graduated at Christmas.  I asked him if he could please send me a letter to that regard for my records, and he replied, “NO, Sir,” and hung up.
    Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened—drafted in September, postponed until graduation.
    I’d been a Christian for several years, and so I asked God what to do.  I spent the rest of the fall taking those classes and doing personal Bible studies on obeying God or the government.  And there were plenty of passages on that—the stories of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego in Daniel 3; Peter in Acts 5; Jesus’ instructions to the soldiers in Luke 3; Moses and the 6th Commandment (Thou shalt not murder) vs. God’s command to Joshua at Jericho to kill every man, woman, child, and animal; and at least a dozen other passages.  All great stuff, but nothing conclusive for me.  I needed something specific:  a command to move to Canada; register as a CO; enlist in a branch and MOS—Military Occupational Status—of my choosing; or let them draft me and take whatever comes.  I wasn’t AFRAID for my life, because I knew where I was going whenever I died: straight to heaven, since the threat of hell had been removed completely when I accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior those several years earlier.  But meanwhile I wanted to do whatever HE wanted, and I still didn’t know what that was.
    One day a very thick letter arrived for me from the draft board in Charleston.  It was maybe a ten-page-long front-and-back questionnaire that wanted to know all about me.  I spent several hours filling it out.  The last section asked about my religious and political affiliations, and there were several questions about my use of drugs, any involvement in such groups as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and on and on.  Finally I came to the last question, which was something like,  Is there anything else in your life that might keep you from obeying a lawful order?  I thought for a minute, then wrote, “Yes.  Several years ago I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior.  He now is my Commander-in-Chief, and I accept orders only from Him.”  I smiled, sealed it in the return envelope, and dropped it in the mail box.
    Then the lottery came, and I got a very high number!  I was so excited I called my board rep again to tell him.  He said, “That’s fine but it’s not for you—you’ve already been drafted, my friend.  See you in January.” It was back to the drawing board, and time was running out. 
    Wednesday of finals week, January 1970, I visited my pastor, the brilliant Leo Oxley of Seventh Avenue Baptist Church—full time pastor, full-time lawyer, paraplegic polio victim who could only walk with his braces on his legs and canes strapped to his hands, and one of the godliest men I knew.  I told him the story, to which he listened silently, courteously.  When I was through, he quietly responded, “Well, John,  it’s obvious that you and I don’t agree on a few things, but that doesn’t make one bit of difference.  One thing really stands out to me, though.”  He paused for effect as a lawyer might in his closing. “If God needs a man to go squat in a foxhole somewhere and tell some other man about Jesus (another pause) and you’re not willing to be that man because you think God can’t keep you from pulling a trigger, if that’s what you think He doesn’t want you to do, then your problem is that you don’t believe God is totally sovereign, and you need to go home and get that squared away first.” 

    Wow.

    I knew he was right.  I thanked him, went home, and told God He could do whatever He wanted—send me to Canada, change my mind about killing people, whatever. 
    That was Wednesday night.  Two more finals and a wakeup later, Mom and Dad picked me up at the house  at 2000 Fifth Avenue and helped me load into the station wagon what little I’d acquired and had left in nine semesters at Marshall.  We spent a good weekend together at 7 Keiffer Drive in St. Albans, and at oh-dark-thirty Tuesday morning, I ate my last meal as a civilian—breakfast as only Mom and Dad can fix it—and I kissed Mom goodbye.  A half hour or so later, Dad dropped me off at the federal building in Charleston. 

=====*************=====
“Lambchops and Onion Soup”

    As the only college grad in the several dozen of us waiting in the large foyer, I was given the paperwork to carry on the bus ride to the induction station in Beckley.  Most of them were just out of high school and several years younger than I.  I asked the man who’d handed me the envelope what he wanted me to do with it.  “Give it to the sergeant in Beckley.  And you’re in charge of making sure everyone on the bus gets there,” he said.  We made it without a hitch, and I didn’t have to say anything to anybody.
    That morning in the induction center in Beckley was mostly sitting around on benches, sitting around on benches, and sitting around on benches.  That was my first introduction to army life:  hurry up and wait.  From time to time a corporal or sergeant in clean, crisp khakis would step out of an office and call someone’s name.  The name—not yet soldier and no longer civilian— would stand, enter the office for a few minutes, then return to his seat.  
    On one of these occasions, the sergeant stepped out and with a smile on his face said he needed a volunteer for the Marine Corps.  He waited and looked around the room for a response as every man slid down lower into his seat.  “OK, then,” he said.  Without looking at his clipboard, the sergeant lifted it up, randomly placed his pointed index finger on it, and said, “My volunteer IS…” and he looked down and read the name under his finger.  The tiniest of all of us, who looked to be maybe fourteen, stood up, shaking.  “Thank you, Marine,” said the sergeant with a smile.  “This way, please.”  The kid picked up his bag and disappeared through the door.  We never saw him again.
    Finally another sergeant herded the rest of us into a different room, spoke to us for a few minutes about the importance of what we were doing, and told us to raise our right hands and repeat after him.  I did, except for the repeating-after-him part.  After his first two words, “I swear…”, I immediately thought of Jesus’ command to not swear, and did not repeat any of the words he said.  Instead, I silently told God again that I would go wherever He said to go and do whatever He said to do.
    Then it was another bus ride back to Charleston, a flight to Louisville, and a short bus ride to Fort Knox.  On the flight over, I’d remembered something a friend had told me back in the fall about going to Basic, that when they’d gotten their haircuts, the barber had asked one of my friend’s buddies if he wanted keep his sideburns.
    “Yeah, please,” he’d responded. 
    “Here you go,” laughed the barber, as he zipped off the lamb chops and dropped them into my friend’s buddy’s lap.
    Most of us went to the rest room in the air terminal.  Remembering my friend’s story, I took my Dopp kit in with me and in just a couple of minutes had shaved off the sideburns I’d nurtured from stubble.  Nobody was going to play that cruel trick on me.

    When we exited the bus at Fort Knox, it was very late and very cold, and we were very hungry.  I was thankful when they moved us to a big heated mess tent and served us all the onion soup we wanted.  Then a very friendly kid about my age—wearing a helmet with the gold bar of a 2LT—stood up to tell us we could call him by his first name:  SIR.  He sent us to billeting warmed and filled, but not particularly comforted.
    That first night several were assigned to stand fire guard for an hour each in our billets.  They were to walk the floor for their hour so as not to fall asleep, watching for any fire and alerting all if there was one, then wake up the next man and make sure he was on his feet before climbing back into their own bunks to finish the night.  I pulled fire guard several times during that first week, known as “Zero Week” since it didn’t count as one of our eight weeks of training.  Fires were the biggest danger in those old all-wood WW2-era buildings, and the army went to great lengths to prevent them.  Big number-ten tin cans hung from posts and walls everywhere you looked, maybe a dozen of them on each floor of the two-story buildings.  Painted red with the large words “BUTT CAN” in white on them, each contained a couple of inches of water to make sure any smokes that were dropped in were doused out.
    Zero Week included everything involving our transition from civilian life to the military.  We walked into the  camp barber shop with every haircut imaginable and walked out with one—a skin-head buzz cut.  A trip to the quartermaster provided us with every piece of uniform clothing we’d need, from two pair of boots to winter hat and helmet, from socks, skivvies, and long johns to field jacket, overcoat and liner.  Back at our billets, we’d been given boxes in which to pack everything we’d brought with us to send back home.  Everything we’d been issued went into our footlockers.  I found that my small King James Bible just fit into one of the side pockets of my field jacket.  And I’d kept back several pairs of my jockey shorts to wear under my service-issued boxers.  Just about everything else went into the box addressed to 7 Keiffer Drive.

=====*************=====
“Commander-in-Chief”

    The next day several of us, maybe the whole platoon, were jammed into the waiting area of the office of a sergeant who was processing the paperwork involving the questionnaires we had sent in that fall before induction.  All of a sudden she loudly called my name: “GWIN!” I went over to the window in front of her desk. 
    She said, “I can’t process this with this statement on here!” pointing to the last page of the questionnaire, the last question of which had said,  Is there anything else in your life that might keep you from obeying a lawful order?  I remembered it well, that I had written, “Yes.  Several years ago I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior.  He now is my Commander-in-Chief, and I accept orders only from Him.”
    “Well, sergeant, it has to stay on there.”
    She said, “You’ll have to go see Sgt. Soandso down at Building Suchandsuch to have this approved,” and she handed me the questionnaire.
    Outside, the darkened winter day was completely overcast with light flurries of snow dancing in the cold air.  I walked the two blocks down the street and found the building, another WW2 barracks building like we were bunking in.  My thoughts as I made that lonely trek were to the effect that this was it.  Based on my testimony, I felt sure that I’d be discharged and sent home now in a matter of hours.  I prayed, committing the situation again to the Lord, and reviewed verses as I walked.
    I knocked on the door and a faraway voice yelled “Enter!”
    Sergeant Soandso was older, maybe an E-7 to E-9 "lifer"-type with graying hair. He was sitting at a desk at the far end of the room that had been emptied of all other furniture—cots, wall cabinets, chairs, everything was gone.  The bare floor had been waxed to a high shine.  All the lights were off but one, a single bulb hanging from the ceiling over his desk, its reflection in the waxed floor brightening things a little.  The only other items in the room were a file cabinet, a trashcan, and a space heater, all next to him.  I walked the entire length of the room, feeling like I was perhaps approaching the Wizard of Oz.
    When I finally stood at his desk with questionnaire in hand, he continued writing silently, then, without looking up, he gruffly asked, “Whaddaya need?”
    Holding out the paperwork, I told him what the sergeant at Processing had said.  He finally laid the pencil down, took the packet, and found the offending statement, seemingly reading it silently several times.   Only then did he look up at me and carefully ask, “What - do - you - mean - by - this?”
    Thoughtfully, I pretty much repeated the statement back to him again:  “Well, Sergeant, a few years ago I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and became a Christian.  He became my Father and my Commander-in-Chief, and I only accept orders from Him.”  Something like that.
    He paused a few moments and looked back down at the papers.  Then he picked up his pen and wrote a few words on the questionnaire and signed his name.  Folding up the papers, he held them out to me with, “I think you have a good attitude, Soldier.  Take these back to the sergeant and tell her I said to process’em.”
    I thanked him and did just that.

=====*************=====
“Syntax to DLISW”

    On at least one of the days of Zero Week we took a dozen or so tests to see what we were qualified to do.  The only test I remember anything about was the language aptitude test.  Someone had invented a nonsense language that actually did make sense when you stopped to study it a minute, if you knew what you were looking for.  One could actually figure out the various parts of the sentences—subjects, predicates, complements, and modifiers—and the way the questions were asked made it possible to construct something of maybe a plot.  It was quite fascinating to me, and, as I learned at the end of our cycle, based on my score on that test, I was selected for language school--DLISW-- following Basic.  
    There were three posts--campuses--for the Defense Language Institute (DLI): one in Fort Ord, California; one in Maryland, I believe, and one in Fort Bliss, Texas, called DLISW--Defense Language Institute of the Southwest.  It was to this third I was sent after Basic to study for thirty weeks the language of the Republic of Viet Nam.
   

=====*************=====
“OCS”

    But back to Basic:   Also in Zero Week I had an interview, my first of several during my two-year tour, by some second lieutenant or captain, the thrust of which as to recruit me to apply for OCS—Officer Candidate School.  I had a college degree now, and evidently I was doing well on my tests.  They wanted guys like me to serve as officers!  But the hitch was that even though I'd be earning a much higher salary, I’d have to serve for FOUR years of active duty rather than just the two for which I had been drafted.  I’d already told God I wouldn’t volunteer for anything but that I’d cheerfully obey whatever orders I was given while in the army.  And so I asked this officer whether or not his request was an order.  When he said no, I politely declined and went back to my unit, just as I did at every one of the other half dozen or so such interviews to which I was invited in the next two years.

=====*************=====
“My Best Friend’s Name”

    Zero Week finally ended, and we were assigned to our training units.  I was assigned to the second of four squads of the fourth of four platoons of our BCT company.  Captain Richard Smoot was the commanding officer of our 200-man company, and Staff Sergeant “Van” Van Stavern was our 40-man platoon’s drill sergeant.  The commander of our training battalion was Lt. Col. “Ace” Waters.
    It seems now like it took us the whole day to get moved over from our Zero Week barracks to our training company, though I’m sure there were lots of other stops in between.  There were short speeches of welcome and introduction from all the leaders.  Then SSgt. Vanstavern moved our company over to the barracks and sat us down for a talk.
    “This is how we…” he started, and he went through the whole gamut from polishing floors to rolling socks,  from scrubbing toilets to arranging our footlockers, and on and on throughout the rest of the day.  At the end, when we were all in our bunks, he told us he’d see us bright and early and clicked off the lights. 
    And that’s when the social hour began, at least downstairs among our two squads.  It seemed like everyone was talking at once, and it seemed most were intent on seeing how many vulgar and irreverent expletives they could fit into any given sentence.  Finally I knew I had to do something, and with no plan or script, I jumped off my top bunk and stood by one of the center posts in the room.  “Men, could I have your attention, please.”  Everyone stopped talking, and I, lliterally, had the floor.
    “Several years ago I became a Christian,” I began, “when I invited Jesus Christ to come into me life.”  I told them that now He was my best friend, and that I was sure they could imagine how THEY would feel if every time something went wrong or something bad happened, everyone would use their mom’s, their girlfriend’s, or their wife’s name to augment the negativity of the event.  “That’s the way I feel when I hear people take my God’s Name in vain,” I finished, and told them I’d appreciate it if they wouldn’t do that any more, at least when I was around.  I thanked them for listening, turned, and climbed my way back to my bunk through the thick silence and pulled the blanket back over me. 
    Several more seconds went by, then one of them said quietly, “That’s cool, Gwin,” and several others echoed similar brief closing sentiments.  And that was that.
    For the rest of the training cycle I heard almost no vulgarity from anyone in our first two squads. Word must've gotten around the whole platoon, because the same was true for the 3rd and 4th squads as well, the "upstairs boys".  Once or twice I'd be standing in a group and someone would let a "damn" or "hell" escape their lips, but they'd immediately turn to me and say, "Oh, sorry Gwin."  Seems the Lord had pretty well cleaned up our platoon's collective vocabulary as a result of our Day One encounter after lights out.

=====*************=====
“Everyone Else’s Name”

    I don’t remember the name of the company Sergeant First Class, but he somehow had found out that I could print fairly neatly and called me on the very first day up to the company headquarters.  Behind his desk was a lined bulletin board about ten feet long, and over it had been stapled a heavy piece of flexible, clear plastic.  The lines beneath the plastic comprised two hundred spaces, and he wanted me to print the names of every man in the company neatly in black marker.  I was glad to help, and an hour or so later he stood back and admired his new board, thanked me, and sent me back to the platoon.
    But now Staff Sergeant Van Stavern knew what I could do.  Handing me a roll of masking tape and a Magic Marker, he told me he wanted me to neatly print the last names of all forty men in our platoon on two strips of tape each.  One would go on the door of each man’s wall locker and one on the back of his helmet liner, a light, plastic affair that looked like a helmet from a distance but fit neatly into his heavier metal helmet when the latter was necessary.  I told him I’d be glad to and completed the task in short order.

=====*************=====
“Mess List”

    At our first meal in the mess hall, we were told the several rules to follow.  First, while we were still outside and in line to enter and eat, we had to jump up, grab the pull-up bar, and do ten pull-ups before getting back into line.  Then we’d go inside, walk through the serving line, sit down and eat, hand our dirty dishes through the washroom window, and exit.  The number of pull-ups increased from week to week.
    The rest of the rules were these:
2.   We could have as much to eat as we wanted but were to throw away nothing: “Take what you want, but eat what you take.”  We could even go back for seconds if we wanted!
3.  We were given only one piece of silverware with which to eat: a tablespoon—no forks or knives.  And believe me, whenever we were at mess, we shoveled it in—we were hungry!
4.  We were to eat and nothing else—no talking!  Anyone caught talking had to drop and give the sergeant fifty pushups.
5.  And from the time we walked in until the time we walked out was to be seven minutes, pushups or no.
    It made me very glad that my parents had taught my brother and me to like everything when we were growing up.  EVERYthing I ate in the Army was wonderful, and eating all of it was always easy and enjoyable.

=====*************=====
“Weekend Pass”

    The annual Fort Knox Officers’ Ball was scheduled to happen that winter, and it had fallen to our Battalion Commander Lt. Col. "Ace" Waters to provide the entertainment for the event.  As it turned out, he didn’t know the first thing about entertainment, but he knew someone who did: Margaret “Mom” Collier who ran the enlisted men’s club for his  and our battalion.  She was a civilian, but she had known for a long time all about the military, especially that she, a civilian, wasn’t going to get any cooperation from the battalion leaders unless it came from the battalion commander.  And so Ace had a deal with Mom: anything she needed, she’d let his office know, and they’d write up the orders, signed by him, to be distributed to all the company commanders in the battalion.  Carte blanche.
    The problem was that few if any of the lower-level officers in the battalion seemed to know about the deal, much less were happy with it.
    So day one of week one of our training cycle, every company commander in the battalion got orders—from a CIVILIAN lady and signed by Lt. Col. Waters—that their clerical staff were to go through the records of every soldier in the battalion looking for anything related to music in their histories.  All of those soldiers were to be sent to the Enlisted Men’s Club to be interviewed personally by her the next day. 
    I wasn’t there to see the faces of the drill sergeants when they got their orders, but the fact that they were going to lose at least a day of training right out of the gate—at the orders of a civilian lady and signed by their battalion commander to boot!—must have made them not a little angry.  To start with, they were going to have to completely rewrite all their lesson plans with literally half their students missing!
    Sure enough, with four or maybe five companies at two hundred soldiers each in the battalion, and with maybe half of those having some sort of musical “experience” listed in their records—two months of piano lessons for one, half-ownership in a toy harmonica for another—we ended up packing the bleachers in the Enlisted Men’s Club (EMC) with some five hundred men.  And so while the non-musical rest of the battalion policed the grounds, polished brass, and did other menial duties their drill sergeants could discover to pass the time, the rest of us sat around at the EMC and wrote letters home, ate candy bars and other snacks, and waited for “Mom” to finish her interviews with the battalion's "musicians".
    She didn’t get through with her initial interviews for two days, and maybe a hundred of us made the first cut.  And while the drill sergeants were now getting back most of their soldiers for training, when it took her at least another day to get her final cut of twenty or twenty-five, that had pretty much demolished their first week of training.
    Turned out that only two of the twenty or so of “Mom’s Musicians” came from our company, and I was the only one from our platoon.  And our DI—SSG Vanstavern—didn’t like it a bit that I was getting so much special attention and getting OUT of more than a little of his training! 
    In weeks two and three our group was getting orders to report to the EMC several times a week.  We’d be right in the middle of a class or training exercise, and a truck would show up with orders to take me and the other man to practice. I’m sure that SSgt. Van Stavern was so mad he could’ve spit all the way to Battalion headquarters.
    And then, maybe about the halfway point of our cycle, big-hearted Mom decided that we’d been working so hard that we deserved a weekend pass.  So down through channels from Ace Waters came the orders.  My DI pulled me aside.  He’d just about had it, he told me, and why did I think that I deserved a weekend pass more than anyone else?
    It was the very first I’d heard about it.  I guess Mom had wanted it to be a surprise for us.  It was a surprise, all right.  NOBODY got a weekend pass from Basic Training.  EVER.  And SSG Van Stavern minced no words letting me know that.
    The next day was Friday, and at practice that morning at the EMC, she asked us how we liked getting our weekend passes.  I mentioned to her that my DI had not liked it at all and that he was very upset with me.  Oh, she was so  sorry and apologized over and over.  She hadn’t wanted to make any trouble for anyone, and she’d try to fix it.  Sure enough, Van Stavern, red in the face and eyes bulging, pulled me aside after training that afternoon and told me he’d just gotten orders from Lt. Col. Waters that I didn’t HAVE to take the weekend pass if I “didn’t WANT to”.  When I tried to explain, he told me to not say anything, that he wanted me off the post in thirty minutes, and that if he saw my face again before Sunday evening, he’d have a blanket party for me for sure.  “DO-YOU-UNDERSTAND-ME, PRIVATE?!”
    “Yes, Drill Sergeant!”
    “Then get the #$%&* out of here!”
    In fifteen minutes I’d showered, changed into my dress greens, packed a little tote bag, and with nowhere to go, was headed out of the company area toward the main gate.  As I passed the company phone booth, I remembered again the phone number I’d been given back at Marshall several months before.  It was for the local Navigators representative and his wife who lived there in Louisville and who had a ministry to Fort Knox soldiers.  I had tried to call him unsuccessfully every weekend since I’d been there and had just about given up.  But now, with nowhere to go and no line at the phone booth, I thought I’d better try again.  I dropped in my dime and prayerfully dialed the number.
    And this time it worked. I don’t know what I did differently, but it went through.  I explained my situation to the rep, and he was delighted.  “We’re having a little weekend conference here at the house—it just started—where are you and I’ll send one of the guys to pick you up!”  I told him, and in another hour I was fellowshipping with likeminded believers around their living room.  What an amazing weekend after all!

=====*************=====
“Happy”

    Sometime into the training cycle it came our time for the rifle range.  SSG Vanstavern led us in checking out our rifles and marching in a column of twos the several miles up the road to the range. I had always taken advantage of our marches and hikes to the various locations on post to review my verses.
    Scripture memory had been instilled in me several years before by Brad Adkins and Bob Jackson, my first mentors in the Navigators ministry at Marshall University.  It had been a practice of everyone in the Nav ministry at Marshall to memorize and review Scripture, and the daily byword/greeting among the group was always, "What's your latest verse?"  And walking to and from class, the dining hall, and other places on campus had given me ample opportunity to do the most important part of the Scripture memory process: review the verses I’d memorized in the past.
    Taking advantage of every “down” time to review my verses had become a habit, and it was a natural thing for me as we walked to reach into my pocket and take out my little leather verse pack—about the size of an unopened package of Dentyne gum—and silently chat with the Lord about His Word.  One day on our hike out to the rifle range, I must’ve been smiling, enjoying something the Lord had said, when the sergeant’s raucous voice interrupted my meditation.  “GWIN!  What are you so happy about?!”  Several turned to glance briefly at me as we continued our march.
    “Just enjoying the day, Drill Sergeant!” I hollered back.
    “Let’s see if you enjoy THIS,” Van Stavern yelled.  “There’s the front of the column up there, and there’s the back of it back there.  I want you to run, not walk, in circles around it until we get to the range!  Move out!”
    “Yes, Drill Sergeant”, I smiled, as I trotted to and around the front of the platoon then back to the rear.  I don’t remember how many circles I made, but I smiled the whole way.  I hope it was a sheepish smile rather than a belligerent one.

=====*************=====
“2-and-3/4-Mile Creek Revisited”

    My dad had already trained me from the time I was 11 or 12 in using the bead sight on his little single-shot .22 rifle, and I had gotten pretty good at knocking down targets when we’d go shooting up Two-and-Three-quarter-Mile Creek in St. Albans.  And when we had “zeroed” our rifles earlier—that is, we’d practice firing them to make sure the round was going to go where we aimed it—we’d been shooting at concentric-circle targets, and I'd shot pretty well.
    But these targets out on the range proper weren’t concentric circles, or the tin cans or glass bottles Dad had set up out the creek.  What they had popping up for us to shoot at there on the range were in the shape of people—silhouettes of the head and shoulders of men.  Thinking about shooting at real men made me almost sick to my stomach with the jitters.  I just wasn’t sure I could do it.  And I’d told God so over and over in weeks past.  And now here I was standing in my own concrete foxhole holding my weapon getting ready to blow away my enemy.  And as I was telling God about my concerns one last time, He whispered inaudibly in my spiritual ear: Don’t worry.  These are not people.  They are cardboard and ink targets.  Do a good job.  And have fun.
    And now the range control overseer’s voice was coming over the loudspeaker, “ATTENTION downrange.  Attention downrange.  This firing range is no longer safe.  Ready on the left?”  A sergeant raised his hand to show that the left was ready.  “The left is ready.  Ready on the right?”  Another sergeant raised his hand.  “The right is ready.   Ready on the firing line?  The firing line is ready.  Firers, load your weapons.”  The sound of thirty or so 20-round magazines being clicked into place told everyone we were ready to fire.  And when the command to fire came, I suddenly I felt very comfortable with the .223 M-16 with the spring in the hollow plastic stock that cradled the recoil and made it such an easy and delightful weapon to fire as we all knocked down target after target, ripping apart cardboard and ink.  And my ears rang and rang and rang from the hundreds of reports and especially from my own twenty, but at the end of all the rifle training in several days at the range, when they counted up my score on the final test, I had earned the Expert medal with my M16.

=====*************=====
"The Officers' Ball"
   
    Thanks to Margaret "Mom" Collier, two of her musicians were from our company and got out of a lot of training, I and the big guy from Michigan in our first platoon, Robert Waller.  He played a mean trumpet, banjo, and several other instruments, while I played piano.
    But Robert was not my partner in entertainment.  My partner, Richard Westbrook, and I had been selected to play for the cocktail hour at the ball and not for the ball itself.  Like I, he'd had a broad background in many genre of piano pieces and could read music well.  But we also played well by ear.  And between us, we knew a lot of songs, everything from pop to honky-tonk to big band tunes.  Since it was just the two of us with only one piano, we'd play four hands on one keyboard, with him in the treble and me in the bass or vice-versa.
    Wouldn't you know that the evening of the Officers' Ball was the same day as our scheduled company bivouac!  We carried full packs including weapons and sleeping bags on one of the coldest days of the year for several miles up the mountain to our campsite, set up our tents, then stripped down to our skivvies and crawled into our down-filled bags with our rifles for a cozy night's rest.  But we hadn't even gotten to sleep before the trucks arrived to take us musicians back to post for the ball, so back out of our sacks we climbed, shivering in the cold darkness, dressed, repacked our backpacks, and clambered aboard. 
    Back at the barracks I had to stow everything, quickly shave and shower, then get dressed in my costume:  white shirt, black slacks, socks, shoes, and bowtie, with a red and white striped jacket and black derby hat, all before the truck returned to take me and the others to the ball.
    But we all made it, and what a great hour of fun he and I had, playing one tune after another.  Occasionally one of the ladies would wander over and ask if we could play such-and-such a tune, and if one of us didn't know it, the other did.  Whoever knew it better would play the treble keys while the other would follow in the bass.  But the best part of the whole evening came at the end of the cocktail hour when his and my ride showed up to take us back to the barracks.  That may have been the best night's sleep I had the whole cycle, knowing that I didn't have to hike back down the mountain but could sleep in instead!

=====*************=====
"Van’s Hillbilly Haven"

    As the weather grew warmer, more and more of our "down time" was spent out of doors.  One day toward the end of the cycle, as our "graduation" was approaching, SSG Van Stavern approached me with a question.  Could I paint our platoon's name on the big rock out by the front door of our barracks?  Yes, If he'd show me where the paint and brushes were, I could, I told him.   He would and did, so I did, too. 
    His instructions were to make it a welcoming sign for the parents and other guests who'd be attending our graduation.  Since most of us in our platoon were from southern West Virginia or eastern Kentucky, it was natural that we got called "the hillbillies" by the others.   So he told me to paint "Van's Hillbilly Haven" on the rock and to include a picture of an outhouse.  When Mom and Dad visited that day, they took this picture as a reminder.

=====*************=====
"Dry Shaving"

    One morning we were all assembled at company headquarters, and I'd not had time to shave.  Noticing my stubble, the first sergeant sent me back to the barracks to get the job done.  One of the DI's from another platoon was sent with me to supervise.  He told me I'd need my razor.  "And some soap," I reminded him.
    "I didn't say anything about soap," he retorted.
    "Well, at least some hot water," I said.
    "I didn't say anything about any water," came the reply.
    And so it was that I learned not only the value of getting up a little earlier to get everything done correctly but also how to "dry shave" in a hurry without soap and water if necessary, a skill I've put to good use more than once in later years.

=====*************=====
"Spit Shine"

Spit Shine
Dress greens—spit shining whole shoe

=====*************=====
"Linda Carney"

Friend Linda Carney died—Sunday wrote her letter not knowing she’d died—years later her mom, visiting at 7 Keiffer, told me how blessed and encourage shed been when she read it.


=====*************=====
"Mail Call"

Mail call — Jason M. Alphabet
Four platoons in our company—the first from Michigan with lots of hard-to-spell/pronounce names

=====*************=====
"The Motivator"

Capt. Smoot—The Motivator—carved holder for his stick with TM below it

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"Fastest--in Combat Boots"

PT test—got cheated out of running award—added a minute to my time

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"Seven Minutes"

Seven minutes to eats—tablespoon only silverware—no speaking or had to do fifty pushups

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"Shot Guns and 50 Pushups"

Getting shots—fifty pushups afterward

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"Mom and Dad Came Over!"

Mom and Dad drove over for our “graduation”

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"Bayonet Jitters"

Bayonet practice jitters

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"Close Order Drill"

Close order drill

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"Hand Grenades"

Hand grenades

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"Tear Gas"

Tear gas


=====*************=====
"Linda Carney"


    We’d already learned how to disassemble and reassemble the M16, both in the light and in the dark. 

    I had perhaps one of the most unique eight-week BCT experiences ever.  Some memories: 

FINAL REQUIREMENTS TO PASS BASIC COMBAT TRAINING
- Complete an Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT), scoring at least 50 points in each event.
- Safely handle and maintain your primary assigned weapon
- Pass the chemical training confidence exercises, demonstrating the ability to properly use your protective mask
- Demonstrate your proficiency in all Warrior Tasks and Battle Drills
- Demonstrate proficiency in First Aid
- Negotiate the obstacle course
- Complete hand-to-hand combat (combative) training
- Pass the hand grenade qualification course
- Complete a 16K tactical foot march
- Pass a small-team land navigation course
- Complete any other tactical field training or situation training exercises


It ended with me getting two sets of orders, one for Ft. Polk and one for Ft. Bliss.  I asked the sarge—Staff Sergeant Vanstavern—which to take, and he said take the most recent date.  But both dates were the same, though the one with the newer hour was for Ft. Bliss.  In a short time, I was headed for the desert experience and DLISW.

    I’m STILL uncertain about being able to attend the 50th in Clearwater, but I’d love to join and see you all there.
    Meanwhile, let’s endure with patience what God has for us in this season of COVID19.  Yes, the unknowns are similar to BCT, the USArmy in general, the DLISW and following experiences which included nine months in RVN for some of us.  But when we know the OWCK—the One Who Certainly Knows—we can leave the ending to Him WITHOUT WORRY.
    Thanks to all and each of you for the work that’s going into this reunion AND for the memories!
    “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”          —Romans 8:28

===============`=========================================================================
    REMINDER FOR FUTURE WRITING:  Flew to El Paso—took taxi to Biggs Field
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    REMINDER FOR FUTURE WRITING:  Feet full of goatheads and other stickers
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    REMINDER FOR FUTURE WRITING:  30-week course from Apr to Dec
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    REMINDER FOR FUTURE WRITING:  Letter to Navs at Glen Eyrie picked up by Dave Simon
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    REMINDER FOR FUTURE WRITING: 
    TAG in day room on 3rd floor—Isaiah verse (THIS desert, Lord?) then down to room—note on door to call             Capt. Simon, called, met next day
========================================================================================
SUMMER, 1970
    Today, 31 May 2019, while looking for some photos for her and Bill’s 50th Anniversary celebration, Dottie Grant found these two photos of me and messaged them to me via Facebook.  What good memories they invoke!  She had taken both while we were  all in El Paso, TX, together, starting in the summer of 1970.  I had been stationed there at Fort Bliss, and several of us would go to her and Bill’s apartment many weekends.  Here is some background to that era of my life.
    When I got to my school at Biggs Field in April 1970, I wrote a letter to the Navigators at the Glen asking them if there were any Nav staff assigned to Fort Bliss or El Paso, TX.  I never heard back from them. I watched my mailbox for days to no avail, and finally decided they weren’t going to answer and gave up.
    After basic training, I had been assigned to a 30-week course in Vietnamese being taught at the DLISW—Defense Language Institute of the Southwest—located at a little Air Force station attached to Fort Bliss, Biggs Field.  One evening while finishing a brass ring I’d been making at the base craft building, a civilian lady working beside me admired the ring and its inscription, “ONLY JESUS IS PEACE”.  Learning that I was a Christian, she invited me to church with her family.  It was Mountain View Baptist church on Hondo Pass, and I accepted her invitation.
    The pastor was Bob Bratcher, and one of the deacons, Orrel Picklesimer, learning that I had some Navigators training, asked me to teach the high school Sunday school class.  One young man I met there was Tony Evans, who came to several Nav functions and did Bible study with me for several weeks.  Orrel also asked me to disciple another young man who had only recently accepted Christ, Mike Oliver.  I agreed, and Orrel introduced me to Mike.
    One day after Vietnamese class I decided to do some extensive review of some of the verses I’d memorized, so I went up to the day room on the third floor of our barracks and reviewed verses for several hours.  One card I was reviewing, Isa. 48:13, says, “Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old.  Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?  I will even make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”  I asked God, “THIS desert, Lord?” and He gently confirmed in my heart that yes, this was the very desert. 
    Minutes later I headed back down to my room, still wondering about this “new assignment” from Him, and I found a note taped to my door: “Gwin—call Capt. Simon” at such and such a number.  It was late, but I called the number, and he answered.  I explained about the note, and he said, quite informally, “Is this John Gwin?”  It was U. S. Army Captain Dave Simon, M.D., and he filled me in on what had happened to the letter I’d written to the Navigators.  He and his new bride had been at “the Glen”—Glen Eyrie, international headquarters for the Navigators—eating dinner when someone sitting at his table mentioned having gotten my letter, and did anyone know of any Nav ministries in El Paso?  Dave and Pat were going to El Paso!  So he had taken the letter, and instead of answering it, he had just decided to call me after they got there.  When the Simon’s had gotten settled in, he had done just that. 
    We decided to meet in person, and the next day after work he drove out to Biggs.  I recognized his face immediately.  He and I had been at Maranatha Bible Camp in North Platte, Nebraska, together the second half of the summer of 1967, I as a trainee at a Navigators Summer Training Program there and he as one of the team leaders.  Dottie had been there, too, also as a leader for one of the girls’ teams.  Neither she nor Dave had been married then.
    Dave’s assignment at William Beaumont Hospital was to do his internship in pediatrics.  I got to know him and Pat Truoug Simon.  Dave even loaned me their second car, his little beige Dodge Dart, to use to drive up to their house every weekend for Bible study.
    One day they introduced me to Bill and Dottie, who had just moved to El Paso.  Bill was a civilian employee working at Fort Bliss.  Dottie was the former Dorothy “Dottie” Davis, mentioned earlier as a team leader at Maranatha  The five of us, along with Larry Mullins, Jim Gelsie, and several other Ft. Bliss soldiers, spent lots of evenings and weekends together.  (Larry Mullins would later meet and minister with Bob Lockyear, who would become a roommate of mine in Las Cruces, but that’s another whole story!)
    Dave, Larry, and I had been studying Hebrews together on Sunday mornings before church, and arriving for the study on Sunday, 15 Nov 1970, I picked up their paper from the front walk to take it in.  The huge headline on the front page blasted me with the news that Marshall University’s football team had been killed hours before, crashing on their approach to Tri-state Airport in Huntington.  I had graduated from Marshall only ten months earlier, and this news lay heavy on my heart for several days.  Finally about Tuesday the newspaper published a list of all those who had lost their lives in the crash, and after school I took it over to the Protestant chapel a block or so from our barracks and sat under a tree to pray.  I prayed for perhaps several hours for the families of everyone who had died before I got up and went about the affairs of the evening.  The burden had been lifted.
    One afternoon, Pat called to tell me that Dwight and Ruth Hill had been assigned to start a collegiate ministry at New Mexico State University.  I remembered Dwight and Ruth from my first Nav conference, a week-long one at Massanetta Springs, VA, several years before, where the dozen-or-so Nav staff speakers had included Lorne Sanney, Dean Troug (Pat Troug Simon’s brother, I later learned), Dwight, and a host of perhaps a dozen others who either spoke at morning or afternoon large-group meetings or led smaller workshops. 
    The Hills had been preparing to leave right after that conference for the Philippines, their first overseas assignment with the Navs.  Now they were returning, and their new assignment was to open the first Nav ministry in New Mexico at NMSU in Las Cruces, NM. 
    Dwight drove down to El Paso and spoke at a little rally Bill and Dottie had set up at their apartment.  There he invited us to go up to Las Cruces to participate in a “blitz” of the campus where we’d share a questionnaire with students to see if anyone wanted to enroll in a Bible study that fall.
    Hundreds of NMSU students were interviewed that September evening, and dozens responded with interest, including at least one member of the football team, Joey Jackson, who would later be drafted by the NY Jets and is today an evangelist with Joe Jackson Ministries.
    I lost contact with the Grants until Dottie showed up some years later at a gathering for one of her longtime friends, Laura McDonald, who with her husband Don were Nav staff community ministry leaders in Las Cruces.  And since Facebook came along, Bill, Dottie, Dave Simon, and I have reestablished friendships online.


1971—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—


1972—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

1973—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

1974—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

1975—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—note taking with Bill Horne after supper (“You know, John, the older we get, the closer we get to getting married”)

FALL SEM—home to WV for Christmas
To NY to see Sheila—ate at Luchows, saw Peter Nero (lived next door), shoes stolen from luggage

1976—

SPG SEM—finished teaching at IHM—gave away job to someone else

SUMMER Session—to WV to get married!  Honeymoon to Niagra Falls, driving the UHaul  in the Nova to LC

FALL SEM—I started at ZIA Junior High with Ron Morren in room in B Wing next to Trula Holstein who taught 9th grade Civics.
There were a few minutes between classes during which we teachers were to be in the hallway.
I walked over and greeted Trula, and we introduced ourselves.   She asked where I was from.
    “Sharon and I are both from West Virginia.”
    “Oh, where abouts in West Virginia?”
    “A little town near Charleston, the capital, called St. Albans.”
    Her eyes widened a little, “Oh, where abouts in St. Albans?”
    “Well, my folks live on Keiffer Drive, and Sharon’s folks live on Poplar Drive.”
    I thought her eyes were going to pop out of her head.  “Where ABOUTS on Poplar Drive?!!”
    Turned out that her husband Ben’s dear old aunt lived on Poplar two houses up from the Hamricks, and they knew each other! 
    That fall I met and worked with many other faculty members.  Teaching in B Wing with us were Mr. Fiedler, a retired Army sergeant who taught Social Studies; Eddie Alba and Olwen Reece, two other Social Studies teachers; Ron Morren and I who taught reading remediation in the Title I Reading Lab; then Trula Holstein, Civics; then Dorothy Allen who taught Special Education; then Kay Simonin, the other Civics teacher; and finally Bill McNeil, Social Studies, who then owned and later gave to me a beautiful piece of furniture, a 33.33 rpm record player just like the one my parents had purchased in the late 50’s.  I don’t remember what happened to Mom’s and Dad’s, but I used the one Bill gave me for years before I passed it on to Charity and Beau who still have it in their basement room as of this writing, July 11, 2020.

1977—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—started 2nd year at Zia, still in B Wing between Trula and Eddie Alba.

1978—

SPG SEM—We get pregnant for first time

January 1978
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM— Aggie football game new stadium—Sh ate salty popcorn, swollen fingers—Jeremy b, 3 Oct 1978!

1979—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

1980—

SPG SEM—Charity Elizabeth Gwin is b., 11 May 1980
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

1981—

SPG SEM—Sarah Joy Gwin is b., 9 May 1980
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

1982—

SPG SEM—
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1983—

SPG SEM—
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1984—

SPG SEM—
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1985—

SPG SEM—
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1986—

SPG SEM—
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1987—

SPG SEM—
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1988—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

1989—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

1990—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

1991—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

1992—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

1993—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

1994—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

1995—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

1996—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

1997—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

1998—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

1999—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

2000—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

2001—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

2002—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

2003—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

2004—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

2005—

SPG SEM—Mom dies

SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

2006—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

2007—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

2008—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—On September 29 in Bangalore, India, my grandson, Asher Samuel Neeraj Pihlaja, was born.  Right now, Friday morning, 10 July 2020, I’m sitting at the Pihlajas’ breakfast table at 8012 Clinton Avenue in Lubbock, Texas, with Asher.  Here’s what he adds about some things he remembers:  “We visited Albuquerque and visited the aquarium with Nana, Papa, Uncle Jeremy, etc.  We saw giants at a botanical garden.”  He typed these memories himself.


2009—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

2010—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—On December 11, my granddaughter, Cressida Noel Pihlaja, was born.  Right now, Friday morning, 10 July 2020, I’m sitting at the Pihlajas’ breakfast table at 8012 Clinton Avenue in Lubbock, Texas, with Cressida.  Here’s what she adds about some things she remembers:  “Asher was too chicken to go to the motion senesced bee  at the botanical garden in Albuquerque because of the loud buzzing sound. I didn’t figure out it was motion sensed until the last time we went there. Heh heh. There was also a big dragon at the end of the walk through the children end of the botanical gardens. That memory is very vague.  There was a large pumpkin toward the middle of the course. The sides looked like it had giant cob webs on the sides with humongous seeds in it. I was a little uncomfortable being in there. At a aquarium, again in Albuquerque, is where I learned that jellyfish are not fish. So the correct word for jellyfish is just…well, jelly. I remember also there being a big circular container with stingrays in it. People would touch the wings of the stingrays, but I never did. I don’t think I ever will. :0 When I was doing school online in the quartine. I found out that I fascinate more with training animals like ocelots and cheetahs rather than just dogs. I still LOVE dogs, so I am relived that large cats sometimes have dogs as best friends. Did you know that a mother cheetah will NOT raise a single cub? If the rest of her litter dies, she will not raise the single cub. Even in zoos! So that’s when cheetahs usually get a dog friend. There is a cat ambassador program where large cats are trained to do tricks just like dogs. And just because I’m going to be with wild animals a lot, doesn’t mean I’m not going to have a truckload of dogs living in my future house. My Nana and Papa are very supportive of my constant changes in what I want to be when I grow up. I have lots of time though. Everyone keeps telling me. I hope my grandparents, all of them, are around for a long time. There’s tons of times to make plenty of new memories.” She typed these memories herself.


2011—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

2012—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—

2013—

SPG SEM—

SUMMER Session—

FALL SEM—Sharon and I turn 62 and 66—I retired last day of Fall Semester—surprise “retirement party” in the gym put on by two of my students  (Alyssa Sanchez and __________________) who had recruited military leaders from WSMR to speak—all middle school students and teachers, Principal Tom Bulger, many parents; Sharon drove out—Tom pulled me into his office to talk of my retirement plans, etc., all as part of the surprise so I wouldn’t see the assembly coming together.

2014—

SPG SEM—Retirement starts!
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—Sharon and I turn 63 and 67—

2015—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—Sharon and I turn 64 and 68—

2016—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—Sharon and I turn 65 and 69—

2017—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—Sharon and I turn 66 and 70—

2018—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—
FALL SEM—Sharon and I turn 67 and 71—

2019—

SPG SEM—
SUMMER Session—

FALL SEM—Sharon and I turn 68 and 72—

2020—

SPG SEM—Coroanavirus19 brings the world to a halt—church services and other activities by online videos/streaming

SUMMER Session—
Traded in the 2012 Dodge Caravan for a 2018 Buick Enclave Avenir.
Went to Lubbock, TX in the new Buick


FALL SEM—School will restart