Gus looks back from Age 72

It's hard to believe that 72 years have passed so quickly. Where did they go?

I was born at an early age. (OK, so I stole that line from a friend in Seattle, who probably stole it from someone else.) Let's take a walk - the long way - from U. City to Woodstock, Ill. (home of the movie, Groundhog Day.)

My very first, and perhaps only, truancy was when I walked out of nursery school in the U. City Loop and walked home. I just walked right out Delmar. The folks, as I later learned, were somewhat frantic as they drove up and down Delmar, looking for me. They couldn't see me, because I was shorter than the cars parked along the curb. I must have been four years old then - maybe about 1943. I just didn't like that school!

Then Flynn Park Grade School to June 1951; then Hanley Junior High School until 1954; then U. City High School until graduation in June 1957. Then I started at Washington University, where I majored in chasing my girlfriend, keeping my car clean, part-time job, pledging, and mechanical engineering - in that order. Somewhere in the second semester of my freshman year (1958), the Dean and I had a little conversation about how it might be better for me to withdraw before he threw me out. And so I did, before he did.

Then a year of working at a "nothing" job, and then I enlisted in the USAF. In August 1960 I got out early after Mom died. Then I started back to college part-time and then full-time at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa. I majored in Russian language and graduated after attending a Russian language institute at Windham College in Putney, Vermont, in the summer of 1964. In the fall I started grad school at the University of Chicago on a Ford Fellowship, but my heart wasn't in it and I resigned the fellowship soon after starting.

Thanks to my life insurance agent, I ended up in the business and worked in Chicago for five years and then moved to Denver in December 1970. I stayed in the business for ten more years and then bailed out. In 1986 I moved to Kansas City for a Chamber of Commerce job, but it lasted only 10 months. Then I moved to Denver and on to Fort Collins, Colo., where I had a great job with NFIB for a year (1989). I spoiled that by accepting a promotion and transfer to L.A. - big mistake. I hated L.A. and bailed after four months, going first to Albuquerque and then to Phoenix.

In the fall of 1989 I found a great job with a dental practice-management consulting firm in Phoenix, but they ran out of money six months later. After brief sojourns to Corpus Christi, Santa Fe and Denver, I ended up in Kirksville, Mo., where I studied regression hypnotherapy and worked with Irene Hickman, D.O.

After traveling and trading hypnotherapy for room-and-board (somewhat like an itinerant preacher), I settled in Richmond, Va. for three years. While I was there, I learned a lot about Philpott family history and visited Philpott, Va. and Philpott Dam & Lake. Met Judy Philpott (daughter of the late Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates) and heard about "Jaybird" Philpott.

Then I moved to Woodstock, Ill. in March 1996, and I've been here since then. This is getting close to being the place where I have lived the longest.