My Portfolio

In the summer of 1949 I was 16 years old and had just finished my junior year in Caney KS High School.   A few days after school let out for the summer I boarded a Greyhound bus clutching a ticket that would take me to the little town of Clendenin WV ...

In the summer of 1949 I was 16 years old and had just finished my junior year in Caney KS High School.   A few days after school let out for the summer I boarded a Greyhound bus clutching a ticket that would take me to the little town of Clendenin WV ...

In the summer of 1949 I was 16 years old and had just finished my junior year in Caney KS High School.   A few days after school let out for the summer I boarded a Greyhound bus clutching a ticket that would take me to the little town of Clendenin WV ...

In the summer of 1949 I was 16 years old and had just finished my junior year in Caney KS High School.   A few days after school let out for the summer I boarded a Greyhound bus clutching a ticket that would take me to the little town of Clendenin WV ...

      The War was Everywhere Affecting Everything Don Carriker - 1944  12 years old At first "The War" seemed to be a fine thing.  There was an excitement and sense of purpose in the air.  Even a kid could feel prosperity blooming.   We moved ...

In the rousing title song of the 1930’s musical “Oklahoma,” the cast sings of corn waving as high as an elephant’s eye - growing “right up to the sky.”  They conclude this joyous testimonial by exuberantly shouting “Oklahoma. . . .  OK!”   Good theat ...

The Thomas Long oil lease was a vast playground but it was filled with dangers for kids that no one seemed to notice or tell us to avoid.  The community water well from which several families drew their water sat a couple of hundred yards from our ba ...

Our house on the Thomas Long lease sat back about a hundred yards from Oklahoma Highway 33 which was surfaced with walnut-sized rocks.  A few times a year a road grader would come along to smooth out the ruts and level the high and low spots.  The ro ...

Shug My Mother   The cotton fields of Arkansas were too small to hold her dreams,                 Too bleak to hold her hopes Her soul heard music, poetry, drama Her mystic intuition                 Told her of stars waiting to be touched But ...

In the first few years after “The War” every American wanted either something they had been denied during “The War” or something they’d never had.  We teen agers were no exception.   There were, of course, some fads that came and went, such as boys i ...

Forgive?   I have much more to be forgiven for than to forgive.   The years between 1950 and 1979 are filled with things I did to hurt other people.   It wasn’t deliberate or malicious but that doesn’t excuse the fact that I did hurt people, sometime ...

On October 4th, 1957, my first year as a teacher and one day after my 25th birthday,  we were "treated" to a beeping sound being sent from space by a man-made satellite.  The first of the many that now roam about the earth. It was called "Sputnik," a ...

Thomas Wolfe, the author, wrote a book entitled “You Can’t Go Home Again.”   Johnny Cash told us in song that “The old home town looks the same.”    Cash, however, admits later in the song that he “was only dreaming.”  Wolfe got it right.  You can go ...