My Portfolio

In September 1964, when I was a teenager of 17, Hurricane Dora came to town. My family was fairly well prepared for a storm. We lived in a single story concrete block house in a Southside neighborhood, and, since we were a family that camped out a lot, we had cooking...

    What is something you were afraid of as a child? For me, it was always the dark.  I was terrified of the night.  That blanket of darkness that would swoop down and take away my sight.  My heart would thump in my chest and I just knew that something...

  REMINISCENCES Where did you attend first grade? Memory Triggers- Favorite teacher, classroom walls, best 1st grade friend, favorite activity. I went to first grade at Laird Elementary School in Tempe AZ.  I don't even remember the name of my first grade teacher, although I do know that I loved her.  She...

In Oklahoma in the 1930's the twin devils of "Dust" and "Depression" were dancing wildly across the land trampling anything in their path underfoot.   History has shown us that in times of adversity and danger such as this, there will be an increase in spiritual fervor and intensity.  This was certainly...

The summer of  1951 my family was living in the Copper Basin of Tennessee where my dad was pastor of the Methodist church in Ducktown.  This area of Tennessee was a rather God-forsaken place with few trees or vegetation able to survive the ravages of copper mining .  I remember the...

Well, not exactly.   When I was 8 years old, I got my front tooth knocked out because I walked in front of the slider swing on our playset in the back yard of our house on Hobbs Road.  It was a cool play set.  My dad built it.  It had...

Typescript of Childhood Memories in Tropic, Utah of Leland Dwight Jolley In the southern part of Utah, county of Garfield, is a pretty little valley and the little town of Tropic nestled a little east of those beautiful colored ledges of the Bryce Canyon. There is a ridge running north and...

*Story Prompt: Write or record a story about a life-threatening accident, illness or encounter from which you narrowly escaped.* I'm not sure if this is technically life-threatening, but it certainly could have been had things gone a little differently. When I was about four- or five-years-old, I was playing with my...

Shades of Proust [Proost]             I bit into the store-bought apple and experienced an instant recall.  I was six years old, standing knee-deep in weeds and biting into the apple Grandpa Kunschke had pulled off of a tree. This wasn’t a déjà vu moment where one experiences a sudden feeling of...

  It was the age of family entertainment through variety shows: Ed Sullivan, Carol Burnett, Lawrence Welk. Dad purchased replacement tubes when one blew on our television, which he called: "the idiot box." We were a family of eleven, and we always had an idiot box. The screen protruded from a...

When I was 5 years old, my family and I lived on Post, as they say in the Army, in Arlington, VA. This was my first memory of living on Post, as I was the youngest of 4 girls. I really loved having so many kids available whenever there was playtime...

Let me take you on a summer ride in the countryside. Imagine traveling down narrow roads that roll up and down green hills and snake along blind and winding turns. Picture passing cow pastures, corn and soybean fields, majestic horse farms and sweeping thickets of old, deciduous forest. Maybe you occasionally...

Our big family of 10 kids squeezed into the smallest house in the neighborhood on Rockland Street. Dad continually added on to the little house as each new child was born. One of Mum's greatest dreams was to have a home that was finished. That wasn't ever going to happen on...

As I look back on the year 1947, I now realize it was one of those important years.   The main event took place January 11th when I became a big sister to my brother Jim.  Yesterday happens to have been my brother's 67th birthday!   On that Saturday morning 67...

Marie Played Baseball Contributed By Jay L Young In the sixth grade we played baseball with a mixed team, and we would go to different schools on Friday afternoon on a hay rack pulled behind a tractor or car. We played Happy Valley-Bennett-Scism-Melba-Glendale-Greenhurst. Then they would also come to Bowmont. We...

Toys   I don’t remember any toys I had when I was very small. There are pictures of me holding a poor stuffed giraffe by the neck. Karen and I usually got our toys at Christmas. I don’t remember either of us getting a toy as a birthday present or at...

Birth I was born October 29, 1941 to Ted Lane Satterfield and Alma Lou Strickland Satterfield. My older sisters were Alma Elaine Satterfield and Joyce Angeline Satterfield. My younger sister, born in 1944, was Karen Elizabeth Satterfield. (More about them later). The hospital where I was born, St. Luke's on the...

It was April 2, 1961 -- Easter Sunday.  The tradition was to go to my father's parents for Easter supper, about 30 miles to the north in Grafton, North Dakota.  However, my mother was nine months pregnant with child number 6, and the hospital where she was scheduled to deliver was 20...

Grocery shopping with Mother and Daddy was pretty interesting. We shopped on Friday evening because Friday was pay day. I guess it began on Thursday night when we had leftovers for supper, both to pare down the contents of the refrigerator and to avoid waste. Then on Friday morning Mother defrosted and cleaned...

  It was planting time again and I had been thinking long and hard in response to Papa's question, "Sissy, what do you want to plant in the garden this year?" We were going shopping for seeds on Saturday and I knew now exactly what I was going to buy. Papa...