Patty is here tonight to start me on a journal. We have had a fun weekend with dinner up on the Shack above Snug Harbor watching the pelicans brigade and the traffic on the bridge. We enjoyed breathing the fresh air and seeing the smoke from the brush fires in the distance. Tomorrow we will go to church and see how the new community building is coming along in Fort Myers. Patty says to pick a story I feel like telling again. I find it interesting that my Dad grew up in central Illinois in Abraham Lincoln territory to very young parents on a very poor farm with no hint of ever going on to school. Yet, he was known as one of the greatest educators in central United States when he died. There is a football stadium named after him in Burlington, Iowa. He built this stadium in a ravine in downtown Burlington Iowa with concrete steps. These steps hold two thousand people. The night lights were the first ones installed in the country in a high school west of the Mississippi River. This was a former lumberyard. The seats go up one side of the stadium and the wooded hill on the other side of the stadium has the glory of autumn leaves right during the football season. The high school has been rebuilt out on the edge of town but they still use this football stadium. While he was growing up he went to grade school (eighth grade two years as most boys did) because they spent most of their time helping their father. They had very little equipment and very little if any fertilizer. I think one year my grandfather gave my grandmother six dollars from the fall crop to buy clothes for the family for the year. My grandmother went to the woods to find something similar to yeast to raise the bread dough. They had very little dishes or silverware. My grandfather really did eat peas on his knife probably because he had no other silverware. I think they had three children by the time they were twenty. to be continued--tomorrow I am going to explain how my grandfather's sister was his mother in law. Think about that.