Intuitive fred888: A miss is as good as a mile!

When you would almost die from something that happened this is what my father would say. And this happened a lot in the 1950s and 1960s in my life. I suppose it is the pioneer spirit because my father's family first came to the U.S. in the mid 1720s. So, we were descended from those that survived those days and settled the U.S. all across from Philadelphia to Illinois, to Kansas and then my grandfather went to Arizona, California, Texas before he finally bought a house in 1927 in Seattle in Lake Forest Park. I think he was born in the 1870s or 1880s. All my grandparents were born in this era. So, they were all about 20 at the turn of the century to about 1910. My father was born in 1916 and his oldest brother in 1912. There were five children in my father's family 3 boys (the eldest) and 2 girls (the youngest).

My father and my grandfather had this great pioneer adventurer attitude. My grandfather once spent a winter on a trap line in the Sawtooth mountains by himself of Idaho (sometime between 1920 and 1925 likely) because his kids were little and he just couldn't deal with his wife and kids at that point. A lot of men were like this in the 1920s by the way. It was just the way things were then.

My father at age 24 chartered a yacht from Canada and brought his younger brother and his first wife along and went to the Tahiti Tuamotu archipelago in 1938 I believe and they stayed down there until they realized there was going to be war in the Pacific Ocean area between Japan and the U.S. and Germany in 1941 when they took a steamship first to Hawaii in Honolulu and then to Seattle where my father's father had an electrical contracting business then. My father and his brother worked as electricians for their father whenever they were in Seattle.

So, there is this adventurous quality in all of us. My turn didn't fully come into my life until I was married raising 3 kids in 1985 when my family (wife and kids and I ) spent 4 months in Japan, India, Nepal and Thailand. This made my family Citizens of the world in many respects and we have all been world travelers ever since. Recently my son returned from South Korea after living there for 5 years with his wife and son so this adventurous spirit continues in my family.

So, this attititude that we can go anywhere and do anything still continues within my family. And if you can survive living like this because you are good at making survival decisions when you need to then this can be a good thing. Being a Californian is helpful to in this because we are the most experimental place on earth in the psychology of what it is to be a coastal Californian and this attitude I find not just in California now but also in Oregon and Washington and for that matter in all or most of the western States.

When my father and his wife and brother left Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles they didn't see land for 40 days until they found Tahiti only using a sextant and the sun and stars to guide them. They saw flying fish schools of 30 or more flying fish flying through the air and sometimes shot some with a bow and arrow with a line attached to an arrow for food. It boggles the mind the adventure they had when a steamship only visited Tahiti once every few months and there wasn't electricity yet on Tahiti and people still would howl at night when haunted by ghosts in their villages. This was still a very primitive time for the area then compared to now. My father didn't do as well as he wanted to there because he realized he wasn't cut out to sit around and eat bananas and papayas and go spearfishing underwater with goggles all the time because by then he had become a workaholic like his father before him from working as an electrician in Seattle since he was 18 and graduated Valedictorian of his High School. His Father wouldn't let him or his brothers go to college and instead made them work for him. But, part of this was the fact that they all had jobs, cars and girlfriends or wives whereas most college graduates then were starving. Unless you knew a needed and useful trade during the great depression you starved sometimes to death.

When he returned to the U.S. Mainland he and his older brother worked building Liberty ships as electricians during world war II because he and his older brother had already served in the Marine Core Reserves as Hellcat biplane Gunners from 1934 to 1937. He spoke of how the pilots would dive bomb the people on the beaches of Seattle during the summertimes then. Things were a lot different then than now regarding everything. This is a Hellcat biplane with two open cockpits one for the pilot and one for the gunner. The pilot and gunner sit on their parachutes as a cushion.

though this is only a model and not a real photo I thought I would share it to give you a better idea of what a Marine core Hellcat biplane actually looked like then.

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