Growing Up with the Cub Scouts
There wasn’t a whole lot to do in Dupo, Illinois back in the late 1980s / early 1990s. Thankfully, I got involved in Cub Scouts. Most of the boys in my core group of...
Tagged: elementary school
A Literal Kid
I was a very literal kid. More so than most. Like the other kids in the gifted and talented class, I tended to take words and terms at face value. Somehow my left brain...
Guerrilla Redecorating
I was probably around nine or ten years old. It had been a normal day at school, so normal that I don’t remember anything about it. But when I came home, my world turned...
My First Computer: The Tandy 1000HX
It was my tenth birthday. I spent the afternoon in downtown St. Louis with my dad. When I came home, there was a computer in the living room, a Tandy 1000HX. “Happy birthday,” my...
No Smoking
I hate cigarettes. I always have. If there’s even a whiff of smoke in the air, I can smell it. And while I certainly have my share of bad habits, smoking is not one...
The Railroad Crossing From Hell
For a while my family lived in a small town named East Carondelet, Illinois. We lived in a little farmhouse several miles out of town, and we had to drive on a scary levee road...
Drinking Coffee as a Kid
I invented Starbucks as a kid. Okay, not really, but I wonder if I could’ve. Back in the 1980s, before gourmet cafes became all the rage, I liked to mix up elaborate drinks. Sometimes...
Memories of MS-DOS
My first exposure to MS-DOS was at my aunt’s house. She had an old IBM computer in the basement. It had an amber monitor, and all the words on the screen were a hideous...
Gifted and Talented
Back in grade school, I got admitted to the “gifted and talented” class. Once a week, I went off to the school library for an enrichment session. It was supposed to give us a...
Penmanship and the Palmer Method
The Palmer Method still strikes fear in my heart. No other curriculum ever did so much to stifle my interest in a topic I found fascinating. I spent a good chunk of the third...
