As earlier promised, I will recount a few memories of some of my growing-up period.  It will not have many pictures, as most of my photo archives are at home, and most of my activities, at least the ones worth mentioning, occurred at times and places where there was no camera.

In 1956, my family moved to Orem, Utah from Spanish Fork when I was only three years old.  I don't remember much about the Spanish Fork years except that I was terrified, from an early age, of some formless tormentors I only knew as eeeeeeees (plural...singular would be eeeeeeee).  Later we figured that must have been because whenever Michelle and/or Maurine were scared they would shriek "eeeeeeeeeeee!"

Orem in the late 50's was a great place for a kid to grow up.  We moved to a new neighborhood where we were the first occupants of our home, and construction was going on all around us.  Our home, like most homes in that period, did not come pre-landscaped with a sodded lawn and half-mature trees.  My father had to clear our front and back yard of several tons of "Utah potatoes" (rocks that seemed to infiltrate the soil from the surface to a foot or more deep) before he could plant much of anything.  These he moved to a "temporary" location on the south side of our back yard that became known as "the rock pile" (sounds like the title of a B prison movie).  I and many of my chums will be  forever grateful that it was not as temporary as originally hoped, as it became a great location for many of our early games of playing with toy soldiers (including our dandy lion armies), cowboys and Indians, war reenactments, geological study, and other forms of childish diversion.

Another fertile location for young imaginations were the numerous home construction sites.  There were many places near our neighborhood that smelled like lumberterias as the workmen would cut the larger pieces down to the sizes they needed.  We often found in their scrap piles pieces of wood that could be used to construct boats suitable for the irrigation canal nearby.  There were also chunks of sheet rock that could be used to draw four-square boundaries or other markings on the black top of our dead-end road.  And of course, some of the round plugs, called "slugs",   cut out of the electrical boxes were round and  a dull silver color, and resembled various denominations of coins (nickels, dimes, and quarters).  It was considered a bit of good luck to find any quantity of those.

Finally, our neighborhood road ended at the edge of an old sweet cherry orchard.  That meant, of course, trees for climbing; there was a gentle old horse that we never tried to ride, but did feed handfuls of green orchard grass and sweet clover to; and there was irrigation.  Two times a week water was turned down a shallow irrigation ditch that bordered our property on the north, and watered our garden and flooded our back lawn...many great times, and wild dewberries and asparagus to beat the band.  The most attractive feature, however, was the canal that fed all these smaller ditches and was the source of a more or less constant siren song leading little boys to its banks.  More on that later.