I am 77. I continued to run five miles three times a week until I was 72. AT 65 I could still bench 250 pounds.
Last year two of my neighbor's 150-175 pound great danes had my 100 pound german shepherd down on the ground getting ready to kill her. I kicked one in the rib cage so hard that it flipped over and hit the ground running. My dog then began to take care of the other one. I chased the one I had kicked until my 45 year old neighbor came running out telling me to leave his dog alone. I didn't...I ran that son-of-a-***** all the way back into it's yard. I'm a trim 188 pounds and I'm 6'1" tall. Like I told you in a post before. I'm not afraid of a goddam thing. My mother turned 99 the last day of July. Her oldest brother fell off a ladder while cleaning out his gutters when he was 95.
About the pudding...I like ribeyes, T-Bones and vanilla milk shakes with raw eggs.
Did you know anyone can say anything on the internet?
Yeah but I've never posted a damn thing that wasn't true.
I was born Sept. 26, 1934 on a west Tennessee dirt farm. My dad's first regular job was timekeeper on the WPA...before that he traveled with a vaudeville show and worked anywhere he could pick up half a dollar.
When the war started he hired with P&G at a shell loading plant in Milan, TN. He worked his way up to superintendent over a shift which was cooking TNT and turning out 500 pound bombs.
He heard someone tell that they were hiring for a job in east Tennessee and went for an interview. We moved to Oak Ridge, TN in 1944 when I was almost ten. He started work on the Manhatten project where uranium was separated in the gaseous diffusion plant, K-25, and sent to Y-12 for further enrichment. The bomb which was made from that enriched material went into a bomb named Little Boy...the bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima in late summer 1945. There was also a plutonium bomb named Fat Man which was dropped on Nagasaki. It was made in the labs out west, Los Alamos being the primary site.
I carried papers and mowed lawns while I was in grammar school and Jr. high and went in debt for my first car before I was old enough to drive it legally. As soon as I turned 16 I began working in an old fashioned full service garage. I worked 40 hours during school my junior and senior years, 60 hours during the summer.
I hired in at the gaseous diffusion plant five days after my eighteenth birthday and went to school for 27 months learning the complex process at that facility. The finished product at that time was 96%-97% uranium 235 isotope used for nuclear weapons and medical research. In 1957 I was drafted and served at Ft. Jackson, SC and Ft. Bliss, TX in 1957 and 1958 then stayed till 1964 in the Tennessee national guards. The company, Union Carbide maintained my seniority while I was away as if I never missed a day. When I returned I began earning about $1.00 more an hour than when I left. In those days $125 a week was considered good wages.
In 1961 because of a reduction in force and my lack of seniority I transferred to the data processing facility where they had just installed an IBM 7090 with bells and whistles. It cost $2.5 million. In today's dollars that would no doubt be at least ten times that.
I trained as an operator there, learned to program in SPS, CT and Fortran 1. After about eighteen months I was promoted to shift supervisor. In 1968 my boss transferred to Chicago at a data processing facility which did all computing for nine divisions of Union Carbide and on his way out he recommended me to fill his position and for the first time I began to work straight days. Before that everything I worked was a three shift rotation.
I kept that job and supervised from 22-41 computing and telecommunications employees and we ultimately had one of the biggest mainframe computing centers in the country. $66 million of equipment installed on 18,000sq. ft. of floating floor. Our power bill to TVA was over half a million dollars a year and it required over 400 tons of refrigeration to cool it.
I retired after 41 years service and moved to the lake. I have three children, eight grandchildren and one great grandchild. She's in Germany with my granddaughter and they're waiting for her father to be deployed to Afghanistan. He pulled two tours in Iraq beginning about six years ago.