From the time I was ten on, it was forty miles from our ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to my violin teacher's house in Sacramento. It was at a time during the Depression that the SP Railroad had put most of the workers back to work, and my Dad was putting in a full five day week as a machinist at the SP shops. (By then he had given up the notion of trying to make a living in the world of entertainment.) My music lesson was every Friday at four-thirty, so on Fridays my Mom would put me up a lunch and I would go to Sacramento with him, and from 7:30am when he started work until 4:00pm when his shift was over I was on my own. I wondered the river front where the Delta King and Queen were often tied up along the docks and the red light district (another story) that lay between the river and the down town part of the city. But mostly I spent my idle hours at the Sacramento City Library which was located at the fringe between the respectable part of town and the red light district. Cowboy, I read eeverything that Will James and C.S.Forester ever wrote, and many, many other books of adventure and the early west. I devoured books, and the librarian lady would point me in the direction of books she thought I might like after she, like the red light ladies and the cops that walked their beats had all satisfied themselves that I was neither orphan or runaway or truant.

At noon I would meet my dad and eat my lunch with him and then when he went back to work, I either went back to the library or if he had fifteen cents to give me i took in the matinee (generally a cowboy movie) at the Roxie Theater. For three years I never went to school on Friday's. I don't read much anymore, mostly because I've slowed down so much i don't seem to have time. The last books I've read are Cormack McCarthy's Border Trilogy. (Forthe second time) If you haven't read it, I recommend it highly.

Spud