24.Describe a typical family dinner. Did you all eat together as a family? Who did the cooking? What were your favorite foods?

Daddy was a logger/truck driver/heavy equipment operator.  So often he worked late. Mama would usually make a casserole and keep some warm for him in the oven. Mama , Donna and I ate together at the table. No TV on in those days.

We ate fresh venison year 'round. Mama and my Grandma Gilmore had a big garden at Grandma's place, actually two big gardens and fruit trees. So they would  can fruits and vegetables .   

After Grandma passed away in 1979-

 we found canned fruit in the cellar from the 1940's

Mama did most of the cooking - but taught us how to cook as soon as we were able. I remember doing a fair amount of cooking as a teenager.

She makes the world's best fried chicken and gravy- a special meal for Sunday dinner. She also made the best fried venison. It was so good cold that I'd rather eat that than candy!

Mama baked bread, and I made most of the cookies from about the time I was 10 years old.

On the weekends dad would cook bacon and eggs sometimes. He made the best bacon. He also worked in a restaurant as a kid and he learned how to make  mashed potatoes - so every holiday dinner, he made the mashed potatoes.  And he taught both Donna and I how to fry bacon and how to make mashed potatoes.

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I answered the question "have you ever been mentioned in the newspaper". I have thought of some more.
I wrote letters to the editor a couple of times. One letter was about how to cross the street in Sandpoint, Idaho,including my advice on the proper attitude. After spending time politely waiting for the traffic to stop so I could cross, I realized that "waiters never walk".  So my advice was to tride boldly into the crosswalk, look  the driver in the car  in the eye and just dare them  to hit you.  It really worked.

Or maybe it was the kids, fanning out into the crosswalk in front of me with their arms extended, hands flagging traffic to a stop.

Another time  letter I wrote to "The Sandpoint Daily Bee" was about my sister attending a performance of Bye, Bye Birdies. Keith & I and some of the kids were in it. She was still in the stage of her MS diagnois where they were ruling out things. No body knew why she kept falling down, but she sure as hell couldn't walk. She didn't believe it though. The guys carried her into the Panida Theater (from a service entrance near the stage) and she watched the show. I saw a card not long after that, the picture was of two old women (probably my age now) with old cloth coats and pillbox hats askew on their heads,  one of the old women was carrying the other old woman on her back- the caption: She ain't heavy, she's my sister.