Category: Tenderfoot Tales

It was a cool 45 degree overcast morning in late May at Lake Lahontan, Nevada.  I had a doctor’s appointment in Reno.  Rene, my neighbor from across the highway, had arrived to re-install my swamp cooler for the warm days just ahead. Nicki, my aged half Collie-half Chow dog and Kojack, my new birthday gift, a toy Australian Shepherd dog, were out snooping around the road grader and sniffing the… more

During the early 1960’s the first four members of the Hamilton Clan rented a small but well-located three bedroom home on Clovis Avenue in Clovis California. It was well-located, because it was near where I taught school, and it also had easy access and visibility for a new real estate brokerage business that I was starting. We remodeled the living room into an office, and this meant that Jori and… more

Have you ever had an early morning appointment for the following day, and when you lay down you had a “let’s get to sleep quickly” feeling come over you?  Well, that happened to me last night.  I had a morning appointment in the central San Joaquin Valley of California, and I live four hours away in Nevada.  Four o’clock a.m. would come early, but just before bedtime my appointment called… more

It was the summer of 1953, and I was fifteen.  My dad contracted with the U.S. Forest Service to eradicate various types of plants that carried half the life cycle of a disease called Blisterthat’s.  Blisterthat’s disease killed white pines in the California Sierra Nevada Mountains.  The white pines were a major resource and economic driver of the timber industry at the time. Dad and I worked the previous summer… more

It was 1944 and our country was in the midst of a brutal World War.  The men and women who worked in the agricultural industries were considered strategic workers, because they provided the food and supplies that kept everyone else alive, healthy and able to fight to include our armed forces.  Like everyone else in the United States, these workers rationed food, commodities and anything made with metal.  Few people… more

One of my favorite events when I go grocery shopping is to meet a mother with a two- to three-year-old child in the seat of a grocery cart.  I will often say “Aren’t you almost three years old?”  Little girls usually look to their Moms for comfort, and will snuggle towards them shyly.  Their body language says “Should I talk with this strange man?”  Moms usually tell them “Well, tell… more

I could not wait until the second week in June of each summer.  My cousin Billy, who lived in Vallejo, would come to visit us on our farm south of Turlock, California.  This particular summer Billy turned eight-years-old, and I had just turned six on Memorial Day.  Billy was tall for his age, and I admired him for it.  He was bigger, stronger, and could always run faster than I… more

It was 9:50 a.m. three days before Christmas 2010 at the Reno / Tahoe International Airport.  I stood in line to begin the laborious process to obtain my boarding pass, and then engage in my first contact with Airport Security.  There were forty to fifty passengers ahead of me and about the same number behind.  We were all in that familiar maze of zig-zag belts of rope-fabric mounted on waist… more

I was a five year old boy growing up on a dairy and cattle ranch in California’s central valley amidst California’s heyday.  We were in the height of World War II, and we had all kinds of rationing.  The most difficult thing for our farming family was the cutting off of electricity during the nighttime hours.  Dairy cows do not understand wars.  They want to be milked when they are… more