Rick O'Kelley

I dedicate this to my children who I have always tried to put first in my life but mostly I dedicate this to my parents and grandparents who endured much in their lives and receive little thanks in return.

The Life and the Character of Rick O'Kelley

Because I have become active in my family genealogy research I feel it is important for every person to leave behind a record of their life through their own eyes. I believe my sons and any descendants they may have should know the two people who made it possible for them to be born. I wish my great grandparents had left written records. I believe this is important because I know of a man who is remember poorly by his descendants and theirs is the only record that is passed on but I feel that if his descendants understood more about him, his childhood, and how he lived they might hold a different opinion. Like me, I am certain that he had many faults but our natural faults are not always of our making and can be greatly influenced by the time and circumstances in which we live. Being a retired law enforcement officer and a criminal investigator I know that sometimes good people become trapped in bad situations for which they can find no doorway to lead them out. I have been fortunate, I have always been able to find that doorway and most of the time it leads either to a better place or at least one not so bad.

My name has deep Irish roots. Rick or Rickie are common nicknames for the very Irish given name of "Patrick" although it is doubtful my parents selected my given name for that reason and no one can mistake the origins of my surname "O'Kelley". Even the spelling of "Rickie" would have been an early Irish to English translation as the "y" was a later invention. The earliest Irish to English translation of my surname was "o Kellie". I was born in a tiny rural two story hospital located next to the Crawford County Fair Grounds in Mulberry Arkansas. Dr Kirksey conducted his practice in this home converted to a hospital for many decades. It was a place I remember well because my visits were related to pain, either I was sick or I was being inoculated for something, events one rarely forget. My older brother Gary was born in Oklahoma but my two younger brothers, Dana and Coy, were also born in this rural hospital. I am not certain when Dr Kirksey ended his practice but his hospital fell into a state of poor repair in my early adulthood. It became low rent apartments at one point but in 2010 my wife and I made a visit as I desired to obtain a photograph before it was torn down and much to our surprise it had been restored, it looks even better today than I remember its appearance in the 50s and 60s. My brothers and I were not the only O'Kelleys to be born in this rural hospital, many of my cousins can also make that claim as can a great many of our friends and neighbors and this tiny rural hospital is only a symbol of how life in those days was a great deal different from what our children know of today. One did not run to the doctor or the hospital. Ambulance services was mostly non existent as was rural fire protection. Most people died in their homes and without the care of a doctor. President Johnson sought to change that and did but it seems there is a mood in our nation to return to these forgotten days when the elderly often just wasted away with little or no medical care. I believe those alive today have lost their way as they value material goods and personal wealth above the well being of their fellow man. The teachings and examples of Jesus Christ of giving and sharing have been replaced by selfishness and worship at the alter of capitalism.

At the beginning of the 1950s my father bought five acres of land which is located on what today is the southwest corner of Arkansas Highway 282 with its intersection with I540 in Alma Arkansas. At the time of my youth there was no Interstate and 282 was a gravel and sometimes dusty road. At some point in my early childhood my father purchased ten more acres that joined the five on the south side. The land had been a peach orchard and I can recall some of the peach trees remaining for a great many years in my youth. Dad had an old four room 1930 home moved onto the land and a well was hand dug. I don't recall not having running water in our home, I can remember there being a pump in the old dug well but at some point very early in my youth dad had a well drilled and that became our primary water supply. I can remember a few long hot and very dry summers where we were forced to ration water, people didn't always take a daily bath especially when the summer was dry but dad liked to swim in the creek so many hot summer nights we would go to the creek near Rudy Arkansas and swim till near sun down and this help make the very hot nights bearable. My father purchased a windowed air conditioner but it was rarely used because it consumed a great deal of electricity making it too costly so in the hot summer we spent our time outside in the shade of the trees because indoors was just too hot even with a fan. We rarely went to town, mom didn't have a drivers licenses so when we did go it was when we caught a ride with someone or dad would sometimes drop us off at our great grandmother's home, Ma Dillion, and we would take a city bus with our mother to the places she needed to go. In the summer the city buses were boiling hot but a few stores such as Sterlings in Van Buren had air conditioning and sometimes we would go there.

My father build a tin barn on the line where the two acreages joined. We had chickens for eggs and meat. He bought a milk cow we called spot because she was light colored with spots. He bought a black angus cow that we called Blackie and her purpose was to produce calves which my father had slaughtered to put beef on our table. We always had plenty to eat, lots of beef, and fried potatoes. Dad use to tell us that we had to eat potatoes, we could not be Irish if we did not eat potatoes, little did we know that potatoes were not native to the diet of the Irish, they were forced upon them due to the centuries of religious wars where the English Protestant would force the Irish Catholics into starvation by destroy their oats and corn. The English and Irish called wheat and barley corn and corn as we know it was Maize or Indian corn. A great many of our Irish ancestors, men, women, and children died from this practice and only because they chose to remain Catholic. Potatoes came from South America and were introduced into Ireland only after 1492 and Columbus but because potatoes grew beneath the ground they were far too difficult for an army to destroy so the Irish began to grow potatoes as a form of "Homeland Security" and it may surprise the reader to learn that while cattle were the native Irish primary form of wealth and currency, debts were often paid in cattle, the Irish rarely ate beef, they would during times of peace mostly trade their cattle for imported wine or domestically created whisky which means "the water of life". Oaten cakes made from hand ground oatmeal and fresh churned butter was eaten by the Irish, often only once and at the end of the day so what we sometimes are told by our ancestors isn't based in facts. The English often described the Irish as a dirty and filthy people but English woman Elenore Hull in the early 1890s wrote in her book of Irish History that the Irish were very fond of bathing and did so often and a bath was the first comfort the Irish offered to their traveling guest so history is often distorted by those telling the stories mostly in their justifications for the wars and mistreatment they wage upon their enemies. The Irish also raised sheep, mostly for its wool and I recall in my early childhood dad had decided he too was going to raise sheep. We drove up into the mountains to the Larues and dad bought several sheep but they turned out to be far more trouble than profit so we didn't have them long.

From my youth I recall one calf we raised that my father and Lebert Peters slaughtered next to our barn, all the rest dad sent off alive and they came back in frozen packages but this one was different. It was a gruesome spectacle, my father used his .22 revolver and shot the calf in the head then Lebert used a knife and cut the calf's throat. My father wanted his sons to know how to do this in case times once again declined and such was necessary for our survival. While we may have found this disagreeable, my father was actually doing his job as fathers in our family had done since the beginning of time, my father was preparing his sons for their manhood and the difficult tasks that feel upon each head of the house.. In those days no one could imagine the abundance that we enjoy today so in my childhood we gutted many a fish and wrung the necks of dozens of chickens and it wasn't that my parents were cruel, this was necessary for our family's survival as store purchased meat, poultry, and fish cost a great deal more than that harvested by our family. In addition to home grown beef and fresh raw milk, butter, and eggs, we raised a garden each year and my mother would home can the produce to help get us through the winter. Early on we had a locker at the Icehouse in Van Buren but eventually my father purchased a freezer to store produce that we raised and fruit and berries that we mainly purchased. Of course freezers were new, they had only come into being since WWII but this is how my parents generation and their parents generation survived, the raised and grew their food and put it up by either canning or salting and smoking. There were no Super Centers and while we had a tiny community store, that set on US 71 Hwy near its intersection with today's Arkansas 282 Highway it was just too costly to depend upon store bought food yet this appears to be the rugged lifestyle many in our nation desire to return to because once unemployment, social security, Medicare, and Medicaid are abolished many in our nation will no longer have the means to shop at our Supercenters, they will not have the means to visit the doctor's office and many doctors and hospitals and insurance companies will have to close their doors due to the lack of paying customers. Many Super Centers will close because they will no longer have the paying customers needed to support them. I believe history is doomed to repeat its self because few actually learn from it, they forget the lessons of our past another reason we should leave written records for our descendants, so we will know and remember the hard learned lessons of their ancestors.

In many ways it is a miracle that my older brother and I are even alive. Dad's occupation put him in daily contact with lead. He often came home from work looking like the tin man with lead dust on his undershirt for working, grinding, and sanding the lead that he used as auto body filler and he would bring home pieces of lead bars that were too small to use in his work and my older brother and I would hammer, heat, melt and otherwise

use the lead. Because in the cowboy movies one would see someone bite a silver or gold coin to ensure it was real, it was not uncommon that I being a real TV cowboy would do the same with the lead pretending that it was silver or gold. I suspect some behavioral problems that I experienced as a child may have been due to my exposure to high amounts of lead and this may continue to impact me even today as it is reported to cause high blood pressure and suspected to be one of the causes of ADHD something I have never been diagnosed but whose many symptoms I share from the earliest times of my life. Lead reportedly causes children to have learning difficulties, rob them of their ability to concentrate or do well in school, impulse control difficulties, are prone to sudden but brief episodes of anger over sometimes minor things, have great difficulty in completing even the simplest of tasks, and become easily bored and lose interest. I have had all of these since my childhood but somehow I managed to complete school, stay out of trouble, and hold down long term employment mostly by finding ways to get around my difficulties but now in my "golden years my aneurysm appears to have made this far worse and the methods I used to get around these difficulties no longer appear to work so I have sought and I am receiving treatment for ADHD.

I am not certain if dad had the two bedrooms and bath built on the east end of the four room house before or after I was born but as a very small child I seem to recall it being built in my early childhood and I do recall the bathroom went unfinished and was used for storage for a brief time and we used an outhouse. Outhouses were common in the rural areas and I even recall some people had both. When I was about 4 years old the bathroom was finally finished which was a great comfort. It was miserable to have to go out in the cold and snow to use an unheated outhouse and I can assure you that you didn't waste time getting your business done. For those who have never used an outhouse imagine what your bathroom would smell like if you never flushed the toilet. Imagine if you had no place to wash your hands, it was hot in the summer and freezing in the winter.

My parents were probably by most standards at that time good and loving although there were times my older brother and I may not have thought so, I suppose that is true with all children and their parents. Dad being an auto body repair man knew how to build things. He built my older brother and I a go cart which we kept the wheels ran off. We had peddle cars and tricycles, Christmas presents, and Birthday presents nothing remotely like what our children experienced. We did not have birthday parties where other children were invited, birthdays were mostly just our parents. There were no McDonalds or places like that where children had birthday parties, growing up in the 50s and 60s was much different than the 80s and 90s when our sons grew up but it is just as certain that growing up in the 30s and 40s was just as different. In the 50s and 60s grandparents and aunts and uncles didn't give birthday gifts but on Christmas our grandparents would sometimes give us some modest gift. I remember as a child my O'Kelley grandparents wrapped up a quarter for each of their grandchildren, that would be about five bucks in today's money. It was possible to buy five candy bars or five soda pops or a couple of toy metal cars with a quarter. I seem to remember a Kennedy Half Dollar as well. For my grandparents because of the number of grandchildren they had, giving a quarter or half dollar for Christmas was a sizeable expenditure and while we had birthdays and Christmas it certainly can not compare to the birthdays and Christmas that my children experienced as my birthday and Christmas could not compare to the meager ones if any that my parents experienced. Every generation has improved experiences giving little thought to what their ancestors experienced before them, this seems universally shared with all humans, I think humans are born just naturally greedy and selfish.

You may have noticed that I rarely mention my two younger brothers and that is because there are five years between Dana and I and he and our youngest brother Coy are like a generation apart from my older brother and I. They did not grow up under the cloud of Vietnam, Dana was 14 and Coy 12 when the draft ended and the war was over by the time they came of age to serve. I served four years in the Air Force and my older brother served briefly in the US Navy Reserves. My parents had began to mellow allowing tour younger brothers more liberties and freedoms than my older brother and I had enjoyed. They never lived in our home when there was no bathroom, they never knew our father before he became deeply religious, my parents were financially better off with both my older brother and I out of their home during most of my younger brother's teenage years. They both attended head start, Alma School was much different than it was for my older brother and I and I know very little about their lives after I entered the Air Force so it is not that their story isn't important, their story is best left to someone more qualified than I to tell it but my older brother and I are also different and have had different experience, we have different religious views and certainly we may have different views about a great many things but we also shared many common events together during our childhood. It was my older brother that probably saved my life when he got me a job at the age of fourteen, a credit I have given him more than once.

I am not certain even my generation can fully appreciate just how bad times were for our parents generation but I also know that my parents generation have no clue what life was like for our ancestors but there were some likenesses. When I read about living conditions in Ireland 500, 1000, or even 2000 years ago I find little difference in how our ancestors lived then and how my grandparents lived early in their lives. They were born into a time when modern medicine did not exists. One did not go to the doctor and receive a shot of antibiotics, drugs such as penicillin did not exist so a great many people died because nothing could be done to save them. In 1927 when my father was born or 1931 when my mother was born there were people who died in America from starvation. People were physically shorter and much smaller because they did not have the abundance of food we have today and this can be seen in civil war era furniture and costume.. There was no social security, no unemployment, if you were lucky the county in which you lived might give some minor aid. Fathers, most often the sole wage earning of the family had to make life and death choices about how scare money was to be spent, whether to spend it all to try to save a child thus endangering the survival of the other children or allow a child to die untreated. One could go to the hospital but if they had no means to pay they would be turned away so most never tried they just died at home or where every they were. Most children were born at home and a great many children and mother's died during birth. I don't think we can truly understand just how difficult a time that our parents generation were born into or how difficult it was for their parents but in spite of the great odds, they tried and succeeded to make a place in this world for their descendants. Many think those days can never return but I am not as certain. Many like to claim we live in the end of time because our time is so bad, but the truth is we live in heaven when compared to our ancestors lives a mere 50 to 75 years ago and we do our ancestors no justice when we pretend otherwise. If my great grandfather Charles William O'Kelley had a brain aneurysm he would have lingered at home in bed until he died, but they flew me by helicopter to a Springfield Mo Hospital and spent a quarter of a million dollars to save my life, so please pardon me if I get a bit testy when I hear preachers proclaim how bad things have gotten, they don't know their history nor do they acknowledge how God has truly blessed our modern world.

My public education for the most part was uneventful. My brother and I began our education in a school that burned down and for a period of time we continued in temporary classrooms put together in the old gym. Eventually new schools were built and we both finished at those schools. In all twelve years I received one paddling and that was in my 12th grade year when the coach caught me in the school break room when I was suppose to be in physical education. I also never got into a fight, I have for the most part all my life been a peaceful person always seeking reason over physical altercation. In law enforcement I would use my wits to get people to do that which they would often fight other officers. My parents were not what one might describe as active in our education. They desired that we get good grades and graduate but they did little else to make that possible and without any encouragement from my parents, my school, or the greatest influence in our lives, our church, none of the children born to my family attended college. For my older brother and I there was no head start, no kinder garden, we started our first grade and completed our last all at Alma School. Perhaps nothing exemplifies my childhood more than when I was in the 12th grade and my girlfriend who later became my wife was pulled aside by the vice principle of Alma, a name named Don Nethery, a retired WWII Marine Col and he told my girlfriend that she should break up with me because I would never amount to anything. If she stayed with me he warned her, she would be barefooted and pregnant most of her life. Of course this did not help my self esteem to be prejudged in such a way especially so by an authority figure. At the time I had for several years been working for a local farmer named Bill Morris, I was the only one of my class who did farm labor after school and on weekends, I had a work history as well as a history of trying to always do the right thing yet my vice principal saw me differently. My girlfriend did stick with me, we later married and had been married for five years before our first child was born, twice she was pregnant and if she was barefoot it was because she desired not to put on any of her dozens of shoes. We tried to do different by our two sons and today one is a High School Band Director at a major school in Oklahoma and the other is a Medical Doctor in St Louis, I am a retired law enforcement officer, retired at the rank of Captain Chief of Investigations, an Air Force Veteran who discharged after four years at E5, and for the past 16 years have ran a successful business so in spite of my uphill climb I have done like my ancestors before me, I too have made a respectable place in this world for myself, my wife, and our children and like my ancestors, sometimes it has not been easy for me.

Religion in our home like in most southern homes in the 1950s was dominate but I do not consider myself as religious, or at least not in the way most people would accept. I find no evidence that Jesus wrote a single word of the Bible nor that he authorized others to do so in his name and I find no evidence that Jesus gathered money together and built buildings and called them churches nor did he authorize others to do so in his name. I believe it is likely churches and bibles are the anti-Christ because neither was authorized by Christ, it is rare to find a church doing that which Jesus taught, the caring for the poor, sick, and those in need so while many will condemn me, I believe they do so out of ignorance of what Jesus Christ actually did in his brief time upon this earth. Unlike many of my peers I did not force my wife or my children to become "religious" or attend church mostly because as a child I was forced to attend church and through out my childhood I was terrorized by the many ministers who preached that I was no good because I was unsaved. Physically punishment result if one questioned the validity of the Bible or the claims that Jesus would return just any day and I had no future because God would destroy the world and throw me in a fiery pit to burn for eternity. Why am I to blame I would ask myself. Didn't God choose to create me as a sinner? How could a perfect being such as God be perfect when he creates imperfect people? Even as a child I could not make these square pegs go into the round holes of religion. Why a parent would permit their child to be abused in such a manner I can not explain but many do, my parents did but I choose not to do so. I have no doubt my parents thought they were doing right by me by forcing me to church but I hold a different view. With my children I tried to take the good from my childhood and expand upon it and avoid the bad. I wasn't always successful but I did the best I could especially considering I had to make it up as I went along, I had no examples to follow and I don't think my children turned out so badly for it. My mother was a stay at home mother, she was there for us when we got off the school bus, she was there during the summer when we were out of school and I wanted that for my two sons so for the first ten years of my youngest sons life, his mother did not work outside of our home. She would sometimes substitute teach but mostly she attended school functions, was home for our children when they got off the school bus, was there to take them to after school events some of the things my parents didn't do for me and my brothers, my wife did for our two sons. I wasn't permitted to play school sports or be in the band but both our sons were in band and they got to take trips something I never experienced. Our youngest son got to go to Space Camp while our older son went to a College in MO for a summer program. Our younger son was accepted in the Upward Bound program at our local university and at the end of that program he took a bus trip to Georgia, I traveled no further than 120 miles to Tulsa with my parents to visit some kin. When I left home at the age of 19 to go to basic training for the Air Force I could count the number of times I had spent in a bed not my own and not at my grandparents on one hand with a few fingers left over. When I boarded the bus bound for Little Rock and the Air Force I had received no training in social skills from my parents, school, or church. Religion had such a strangle hold on our school that dancing was prohibited, we were told it was deemed illegal by town law and warned that we would be expelled from our public school if we had an unofficial dance in another town. I was 15 when I had my first sit down meal in a restaurant and that was not with my family but with my employer's family, Bill Morris. When I entered the Air Force, I was "Gomer Pile", backwards, ignorant, and with no one to turn to, I was totally ignorant in the ways of the world and I don't see how this was my fault, those responsible for me had 19 years to prepare me but choose not to. I am certain my sons have no idea of the life I have lived and the events that made me into who I am today yet in spite of it all, like my parents and grandparents, I believe I made my children's lives better than my own.

The preaching of the Gospel is by design to appeal to the greedy selfish nature of humans, convert them by promising them something but if that fails then use terror and fear by telling them they will burn in hell for eternity, that was the weekly message preached in my childhood church as it is the message preached in most all Christian churches and it was the same message preached in 2009 at my father's funeral and this is the chief reason I rarely attend funerals I chose not to attend the funerals of my O'Kelley grandparents because I knew I would be subjected to such once again. I have left instructions that there is to be no funeral upon my passing but religious terror wasn't my only childhood nightmare, each night my father would come home and watch the evening news which was mostly about Vietnam. I began to take interest when I was about 13 and with each passing year watching body bag after body bag come home I began to believe that I really didn't have a future. If God didn't kill me and burn me in hell as the preacher claimed, then surely I would be forced to fight in Vietnam and I would die in jungle. A child's brain is not mature or able to process these forces but I had to and I had to do it alone because no one around me took an interest. As it turned out, my fate was sealed because at the age of 19 and in the last year of the draft, I was drafted by the Army certainly headed for Vietnam. Rather than fight and maybe die in a war that I did not believe in I enlisted in the US Air Force in November of 1971. I pushed even this into my future by using the delayed enlistment program but when that time ran out, March 21, 1972 I boarded a bus in Mulberry Arkansas, ironically just a few blocks from the location where I entered this world, and kissing my girlfriend and parents good bye, I began a journey that would take me to Little Rock Arkansas where I would board a plane, my first, and fly to the a distant city of San Antonio Texas where I spent the next six weeks further from my home than I had ever been and lonelier than I could ever imagine.. My parents, my school, nor my church prepared me for the heartache that was mine alone to endure and I am the only one of my parents sons to be in the regular military so no one in may family can ever know the depths of despair that I felt at such an early time in my life. I can not set with my brothers in our old age and we share our experiences because this like so many other of my childhood was mine alone. It does not make me special but it does make me different.

I arrived at San Antonio Texas with many others, it was late almost midnight and very hot, even in March that area of Texas can be like a furnace. I don't know if it was part of the plan or if it just worked out that way but we were kept up until 4 AM going over the rules, receiving our handbooks, being assigned our bunks, issued sheets and a blanket, and showed how to properly make our beds. Nearly exhausted our TI told us we would soon hit the sack but first he wanted us to visit the showers, not to take a shower but once we were all in this large shower room, he asked for a show of hands for those who left girl friends behind at home. I like several others raised my hand. He then said, what I have to say is for you, while you are here, your buddies will be at home trying to woe your girlfriend and most will be successful so when you receive your Dear John letter and decide to take your life, come into the showers to do it, that way the mess will be easier for your buddies to clean up. We were dismissed and told to hit the sack. As I fell asleep exhausted I did so knowing that my girl friend loved me and she would remain true, she would stand by me. A few weeks later I like many others receive my "Dear Rickie" letter Basic training was the lowest point of my life but because of the traits that my ancestors passed to me in their DNA I somehow endured to pass those same DNA traits on to my two sons.

I suppose I did about as well as I could in basic, I got into no trouble and my TI offered me a squad leader position which I turned down mostly because I did not know how to accept. No one had ever shown any positive interest in me before. My family, school, and church had done much to not advance me, not prepare me to criticize me and put me down so I just did not know how to accept, I thought it must be a trick, that this offer had something bad or hidden attached to it so I turned it down.. When we went to the range I earned a medal, that was one thing my father had taught me to do very young, how to shoot and I had bb guns at home so I had done a lot of shooting probably most southern boys of my age had. I finished my basic and got on the second plane of my life and flew out of San Antonio and its near 100 temperatures to Denver Colorado which was having one of its many snow storms. Still home sick, still love sick, I settled in at Lowery Air

Force Base for eight more weeks of technical training as an Inventory Management Specialist for Base Supply one of the few jobs that I qualified for because of I had a minor color vision defect..

At the end of my eight weeks tech school training my parents drove to Denver to pick me up and drove me home via way of Royal Gorge. Dad had seen it during WWII and he wanted mom to see it. Once at home I had a few days leave, it was mid July and I was to report to Blytheville Air Force Base. It had been many long and painful months since I had seen my former girlfriend. She was off visiting her mother who lived on the east coast and some of my old friends had told me she had a new boy friend anyway so I figured I might as well put that all behind me. Surprisingly I didn't hate her, she was young and came from a broken home so I figured she just didn't know any better, that she didn't love me the way I loved her. My old boss, Bill Morris was an old Air Force WWII Vet and a motorcycle rider and he had traded my old piece of junk 250CC Harley for a brand new 750CC Suzuki. I suppose he was trying to cheer me up. This bike was a road burner. It had 160 MPH on speedometer and it wasn't long and I found it would easily do 120 of it with more to go.

I truly don't remember how I got the bike to the base which was 316 miles from my parents home in Alma but somehow I had both my new bike and my 1966 Mustang at base. Blytheville was a SAC base located on the Mississippi River near the boot of Mo. For those who do not know what SAC was, SAC flew the bombers who would blow the USSR to hell should they attack, they carried the nukes. Our government put many bases in some of the worst areas to live and I am of the opinion that if I had grown up in Blytheville I might would have joined the Army just so someone would kill me and put me out of my misery, so in spite of my childhood difficulties, I suspect many who lived in other places had it worse. It was hot, swampy, lots of biting bugs, and not much else except for women. Blytheville reminded me of the movie "An Officer and a Gentleman" as many of the local girls were looking for even the lowest recruit to latch onto to get them out of there. Within a few weeks one of the local girls had taken a liking to me and I would not call what followed as a romance, she was no tramp, she never used he body to try to capture me, I think she was actually looking for the right person who she could spend the rest of her life with but I wasn't. I was barely twenty years old and already had my heart broken by someone I thought I could trust so while we spent many dates together, I knew deep down that we were only passing time and maybe it was wrong of me not to have made that more clear to her. She was a very kind and loving person a couple of years older than I and she was exactly what I needed in my life and at that moment in time. She gave me an anchor to attach to because she was a very down to earth and sensible person nothing like many of the other local girls who seemed to only be looking for someone to marry and take them away from it all. I felt I could trust her, I let her keep and drive my Mustang and I told her about my broken engagement. She put no pressures on me and was kind to me. She was Catholic and she gave me a silver St Christopher's US Air Force necklace that I still have and sometimes wear today but when it came time to visit my folks, Sandra not having been to that area of Arkansas asked if she could come along so we road my motorcycle home also a first time for her. It was on this trip in early September that I saw my former girlfriend riding in her father's truck as Sandra and I passed them on the highway. My old heartache returned because I had never gotten over my first true love and I wondered if she ached for me. The rest of the weekend was uneventful and on Sunday we loaded up on my motorcycle and headed back to Blytheville. Not all of Interstate 40 had been completed, in those days we had to get off at Dyer and travel by US 64 to Clarksville as some of the bridges at Mulberry and Ozark had not been completed. Even at 70 MPH it was a six hour ride but we were young and raised in a time of little comfort, my Mustang like most cars of that era didn't have air conditioning, neither did most homes but surprisingly my room in the barracks did.

Other than being lonely I actually had a better life in the Air Force than I had at my parents home. For the first time in my life I was free to decide if I desired to attend church, no minister could get in my face and tell me how bad I was because I wasn't "saved". I wasn't free of religious predators, there was a time after I was married when I came home from the base and found my young wife crying because one of the civilian workers had obtained our address from the base and called upon her and told her she wasn't saved because the right words hadn't been said during her baptism, I told him to leave and if he came back I would call the Sheriff; the Air Force had set me free from religious abuse and helped me find my voice. I received praise and promotion when I did a good job and I had been moved from Base Supply to Procurement because I was considered to be a most able person. All my supervisors seem sincerely interested in me so what I began to feel wasn't happiness but contentment which is in many ways far better than happy because one can't be happy forever sooner or later happy is followed by sadness but contentment is a reasonable alternative so in the two months I had been at Blytheville I had settled in, was seen as a dependable responsible person, given a position of responsibility and I had a personal relationship that didn't demand a great deal of me, I was content but having seen my former girlfriend even in the very brief flash as we passed each other on the road, that shattered my contentment. I needed to know why she broke it off when me, especially when she knew how badly I need her to anchor me, I knew she was young but even so I could not understand how anyone no matter their age could do that to someone they claimed that they loved so the following weekend I decided to return home once more to Alma, this time alone and seek an answer to a question that now disturbed my contentment.

Renee' and I will have been together as husband and wife 39 years come September 25, 2011. The details about how we renewed our love affair that has out lasted almost all our friends will remain private; all our children need know is we have paid for our mistakes and they have benefited from them. Since my aneurysm that occurred in 2008 I am often asked by my many doctors, are you married and how long and when I tell them without hesitation each one seems to have the same reaction, "that is a long time". Maybe it is but I don't enter into something intending to not see it through, my only long term goal is to be with the person I decided a long time ago that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.. Our marriage, our relationship has not always been easy but it has rarely been hard and again to say one is happy I think sets themselves up for a disappointment. I have been content but I also believe our life together was the happiest when we were the poorest and I suspect Renee' would say the same if she is asked. Being married to the same person for 39 years is about contentment, finding the things that work and avoiding the things that don't after all when one marries it isn't about what is in it for themselves but what is in it for the couple, two people have to put their own feelings and desires aside to become one and inseparable, it is 95% giving and 5% taking and that is what one must do when they decided to tie the knot. I think because Renee' and I had a difficult start that has caused us to work a little harder than most to make it work, we know what real heartache and despair is like and I don't think either of us desire to repeat it. We were both too young to have married when we did but we had only each other, neither of us had anyone in our lives that was interested in helping us find the right path, we had to find our path on our own and it was mostly by trial and error sometimes very painful errors. As for our marriage we did not have a fancy church wedding, Renee' and I were married in the office of Crawford County Judge Wilbur Mills. Present was Renee's father and my mother, there were no photographs taken I have always believed that ours was a marriage of substance and that is why it has lasted. We were too young to marry on our own, Renee' was sixteen years and eight months and three weeks old and I was twenty years and three months and three weeks old. and while some may look back today and think that wasn't the norm, it wasn't abnormal for our time. Both our parent married young and there was just as much an age difference between my parents as there was between Renee' and I. My mother was a year older than Renee' when she married my father and we had classmates that married younger.

Renee' wore a light green dress that we bought for her at Wal-Mart in Van Buren just for our marriage. We had planned a church wedding on our engagement but having gone though a break up, neither of us wanted to be parted again waiting for a church wedding. I wore my Air Force uniform because in Arkansas at that time the couple had to have a blood test and then wait three days but if the groom was in the military and wore his uniform the three days could be waived. We had only a few days, I was on a three day pass, this was on a Monday I had to be back at base by Thursday morning so time was important. If my memory of this event is accurate Renee's father bought our marriage license for $14 and he paid the County Judge for his services. After our marriage we drove to Lake Ten Killer in Oklahoma where Renee's grandmother lived and spent the next two nights there. For a wedding present she took us to eat at a nice restaurant on the lake then gave us a one hundred dollar bill. As far as I can remember that and the money that Renee's father spent for the license and the judge was all the help we received from friends or family. Over time my parents lent us some items to make our life better and to help out.

I don't think it is possible to put on paper the love and devotion that I felt then and still after almost 40 years feel for Renee' but our life was not without trouble. Young married life in the Air Force in the early 1970s was difficult. Our first home was a tiny 12x50 mobile home in Barker's Trailer Park, there was a Gibson's Discount Store which was like a early tiny Wal-Mart located a few blocks from the park and we were so poor that we would walk to save the expense of gas. We could not afford going to the movies except on base something Renee' didn't like because everyone had to come to attention when they played our national anthem before each feature. We could not afford a TV so my parents loaned us one of their old black and white sets something we watched for many years. We sometimes would pick up pop bottles that people had thrown out and cash them in for their deposit so we would have money to go to the drive-in. We had little money but still managed to buy a small used mobile home. My father co-signed the note at Peoples Bank and Trust in Van Buren Arkansas one of the two notes he signed for me in his life time. Eventually when she became old enough that employers would hire her Renee' took a part time job first at a local five and dime store and then later at a motel that set near Interstate 55. She would drive my Mustang and I would ride my motorcycle. I wish I had a picture of the expressions of the base security guards when in the winter of 73/74 I would ride up to the base gate with ice and snow on the ground. I had no choice, Renee' had no choice, no one was going to give it to us, we had to make it on our own the best we knew how but we were not the first of my family to struggle.

Being forced into the military by the draft had a considerable life long impact upon me and to my disappointment I recently had a woman very close to me tell me that my experience was no big deal because I never saw combat of course how could she know, she was never drafted but to say such in my opinion amounts to telling a rape victim her rape was no big deal because her rapist didn't kill her. Think about it, woman have sex all the time and when they get to choose who, when, and where, they often report considerable pleasure so the awful deed in the act of rape isn't sex, it is the taking of one's right to choose it is the taking of their liberty and that is what the military draft does, it forceable takes from the draftee someone who is so young that most states will not permit them to enter into a contact to marry or drink or buy a handgun, yet the draft takes this person's right to choose how they will live their life and it makes little difference if one experiences combat because after all just as woman choose to have sex, many volunteer for both service and combat, the awful deed is being forced into service and have one's liberty taken not just a night, not just a few hours or minutes but in my case for four very long years. I suppose like many rape victims I did what I had to do to get through it and to survive and that was my reason for joining the Air Force as to avoid combat in Army in Vietnam but that made my experience no less traumatic than a woman being confronted by four rapist and she getting to choose which will assault her. I think one would have to have disagreed with that war and been drafted to understand just as only someone who has been raped can understand what that experience is like.

About five years before my father died in 2009, my uncle Junior Peters as we call him, my mother's younger brother visited me at my shop and he told me a tale that I had never heard, how when my father was only about three years old, my grandfather and grandmother moved from Benton County where they had been working for Mr. Keith a local farmer and into a dirt floor barn in Winfrey Valley which is located just south of Winslow. They live there several years. The next time I visited my father I asked him about this story. He confirmed it, he was very small and didn't remember a great deal about it but he did recall it was a dirt floor barn and he told me, 'but a lot of people had to live that way then". I asked him what he remembered about that time and he told me a story about how one night it began to rain so hard that the creek near the barn began to rise. During the night the water got so high it began to come into the barn so my grandfather and grandmother gathered up the children and they went outside into the storm and driving rain and moved up the hill and settled under a tree. That was the only cover they had and looking back on it a tree high on a hill probably was not the best place to be during such a storm but that is where they spent the rest of the night. Our children today feel greatly stressed when the store doesn't have something they seek yet a little less than fifty years before their birth their grandfather, great grandfather, and great grandmother along with their great uncles Charles, Freddy, John and their Aunt Ellen were living in a dirt floor barn and huddled under a tree during a storm just trying to survive. They were surviving very much and in the same manner as their Irish ancestors did in our native land.

My great grandfather Charles William homesteaded land not too far from where my grandparents were living when I was born. The land passed to my grandfather but I was told a story that the taxes were greater than the land was worth during the depression so my grandfather allowed the land to be taken because of back taxes. In 1992 after the passing of my grandparents my Aunt Mary, my father's younger sister put together a kind of memorial book for the descendants titled the O'Kelley Bowen Heritage Cook Book. In the book she relates a story about how my grandfather came to own the land where the O'Kelley ancestral home still sits today. My grandfather and his family were living on land know as the Poole place which was not far from the land my grandparents were living upon when I was born. My grandfather purchased his land from his sisters husband, and my aunt Mary reports this purchase occurred between 1935 and 1939 and that my uncle Charles and my father helped my grandfather work off the purchased price. In 1935 my father would have been 7 years old and in 1939 he would have been 12 years old. Imagine that beginning at the age of 7 working off a debt not of your own but one that was necessary none the same and never receiving any compensation for it other than the brief period of time that you lived there. I know when my grandparents passed away and the land was purchased by one of my uncles, my father was unhappy about the transaction and I never fully understood why, but it is likely my father felt part ownership in the land that he helped purchase through the sweat of his labor when he was a young child and I record this story so that he will at least have this compensation for his childhood labor. Those were difficult and much different times so while the early life that my wife and I endured during our years in the Air Force and later when I worked at the Sheriff's Department were difficult for us, ours were were not unusual, they were the things people had to do in order to survive. While I worked chores around my parents home, I never had to work and give my labor to my parents as my father did so they could buy their home. I did have to use an outhouse in the early days of my life but I never had to live in a dirt floor barn. I lived my childhood and some of my early adult life having to live out the hot summers as best we could, our schools and homes were not air conditioned but that wasn't the case for our children. Most of their school life they had air conditioning and always had it in our home and that is the way it should be. Each generation should pass to the next the blessings bought and paid for my their ancestors but it should not be accepted without appreciation and never should the past be forgotten . Each generation should receive the respect and acknowledgement that their labors and sacrifice was appreciated and that is why I feel it is important to tell our ancestors' story to our children and hope they will tell these stories to their children, that the lives of our ancestors may live on through their experiences.

My first Irish ancestor to step foot in America was William Kelley believed to have been born in Ireland about 1730 and arrived as a young man about 1750. We find him living in Mecklenburg Virginia from the 1782 Virginia Head of Household Census and living with him as was the Irish Custom were ten others, certainly their son Charles and his wife Mary Crowder and their two children, the first grandchildren to be born in America, William and Elizabeth no doubt named after their grandparents. It is generally agreed that William Kelley came as a protestant, no small feat for a native Irish since most all native Irish were Catholic in his time and great and deadly strife existed between the Catholics and Protestants.. It is a certainty that his father as was his father's ancestors for more than one thousand years were Roman Catholics. It is unknown if William married my grandmother Elizabeth Dean once here or if they married in Ireland but because the Irish was viewed so lowly by the English, "niggers turned inside out" was how most English described the Irish it must be certain that Elizabeth Dean could not have been an English descended Dean and must have been of the old English Deanes who lived in Galway since the the first coming of the English to Ireland in about 1150AD. It is likely theirs would have been an arranged marriage between the high born Native Irish O'Kelleys of Hy-Many and the wealthy Galway City merchant Deanes. They lived in a time when the head of the clan or family ruled with total control, William alone held the power of life and death over his family and it was a time when poor whites as well as blacks were bought and sold on the auction block as life long slaves as were their children and I suspect because it was the Protestant English from which all protestant faiths descend that this shame has been removed from our history. In 1699 just a few years before William would have been born, the Virginia Census records that the governor of Virginia owned 2000 black slaves and 6000 white slaves, certainly many of these were poor native Irish but because once in America our ancestors were soon owners of land and slaves it seems certain that our family descended from the landed Gentry O'Kelleys of Ireland who like the English owned slaves while in Ireland and became Protestant in the first half of the 1700s. It is a certainly that William's grandfather as were all his ancestors for more than a thousand years were Irish Catholic and it was only due to the savage nature of the English protestant that William was protestant, it was a matter of survival.

To fully understand the world William was born into, at the time of his birth in Ireland, most Irish were not permitted to purchase land, hold government office, educate their children, or vote solely because of their Catholic faith. William's grandfather likely fought in the Irish revolution that began in 1688 and ended in an Irish defeat in 1691. One can not imagine today but there are written accounts where during that war poor Irish families, grandfathers, grandmothers, grown children, and young children got up each morning and walked to the fields of their landlords where they worked for little more than the roof over their heads and a few potatoes on their table and while working in the fields, Protestant English, King James Bible English would come upon them and either shoot them where they stood or they would hang them; every man, every woman, and every child solely because they were Catholic and because the English desired the lands that these poor Irish didn't even own. When I see ministers hold high their King James Bible and proclaim it is to be the preferred bible I know they do so in their ignorance of why that bible is preferred, to reject that bible meant sure and certain death and it is covered with a great deal of innocent blood of the men, women, and children who just wanted the simple freedom, the God given right to decide for themselves. I suppose it was mostly just luck or chance that we live because at a single battle at Aughrim Ireland in July 1691 a great number of O'Kelley Irish were killed and their bodies left to be eaten by the wild dogs who grew fat that year.

More recent in the childhood of William was the Great Frost of 1740 or the year of the slaughter a time when the winter was so cold that it killed the birds in the air and the seeds in the ground not just in Ireland but all over Europe. Come spring the grass did not grow and the cattle all died. Food stores turned to mush and this was followed in the spring of 1740 with a drought so bad that streams that had never ran dry disappeared. Disease ravaged the people with a great many dying. In December of 1740 the heavens opened and rain fell not in inches but in feet all over Ireland destroying what had survived the Frost and the drought. Ireland was so wrecked that cattle, sheep, chickens, and even seed had to be imported in an attempt to restarted a land that had been so reduced as to make it unlivable. Certainly for the survivors, for William Kelley these must have been the "end of days" and these were the times that drove William to quit Ireland and come to America to start a new life. It is little wonder that all knowledge had been lost of his life in Ireland, certainly those times were too painful to recall for a man seeking to start anew.

My first America born ancestor was Charles (Dean) O'Kelley born in 1756 and he died in 1810. His gravestone is

located just south of Comer GA in the O'Kelley Whitehead Cemetery. By all accounts Charles was a man of both property and means. In the Virginia 1782 Mecklenburg Co Head of Household Census where William Kelley appears with ten others living with him, it seems clear that Charles, his wife Mary Crowder and his son William and daughter Elizabeth are all living with William and Elizabeth, they will be four of the ten living in that household. Charles served in 76 and 77 in the 8th Virginia 10 Company for 9 months but in 1779 he had enough means to hire someone to serve in his stead. It is believed he was a slave owner as indicted by a later Georgia Census after his death showing his wife in ownership of a slave. This maybe further proof his father William was of the landed Gentry class of Irish as slavery was practiced by this class but was hated by the common Irish who were often preyed upon when slaves were needed. Even at this time it is likely that Mary's marriage to Charles was likely an arranged marriage by her father and because even America born Irish were thought lowly born it is likely that George Crowder was Irish born English, part of the Scots Irish who came from Scotland or English, lived in Ireland for a few generations them moved on to America but is is also possible that he was native Irish as the word crowd was a fiddle and a Crowder was one who played a fiddle something very dear to the hearts of most native Irish of that time.

Charles Dean O'Kelley was my third great grandfather to be born in Mecklenburg Co Va before the family moved to Oglethorpe Ga. Charles was a Justice of the Peace in Georgia, owned slaves and married Mary Stamps also a slave owning family of considerable importance. Some time before the Civil War Charles Dean and Mary moved to Alabama likely Chambers Co likely to be near Mary's father, James Stamps. It is likely that Mary Stamps marriage to Charles Dean was also an arranged or at least an approved marriage. No one know for certain where Charles and Mary are buried but it is likely they are in one of the unmarked graves in the Stamps Cemetery in Chambers Alabama and their grave markers were wood and rotted away long ago.

James Stamps O'Kelley is my second great grandfather and he and my grandmother Lucy are buried only about a mile James Stamps O'Kelley

from my childhood home. He and Lucy lives somewhere very near to the Walter Fine place which later became the Roy Plum home place. Roy is my wife's grandfather. In his 1966 book, J Fred O'Kelley made the claim that the old log cabin that James and Lucy lived in still stood in 1962 and there is an old log cabin on the backside of what is known as the CC Davis property. That may be the once home of my grandparents. James and Lucy are buried in the Love Cemetery just north of Alma.

Charles William O'Kelley is my first great grandfather and I find his name interesting because it appears he was named after both his paternal and maternal grandfather but William was a named he shared with his great, great grandfather William Kelley and his son Charles. Charles was a minister and he married a woman very much younger than he and she came from Iowa and her named was Mary Miller. Charles was a minister, he had a small log church near where the Lodge Hall stands today on Arkansas Highway 282 Loop north of Alma Arkansas. My grandmother taught school in the same log church.

Albert Henry O'Kelley and Julie Bowen are my grandparents and even though they were as poor as church mice I recall receiving a new quarter from them for Christmas. What I remember the most about my grandparents is they always

seemed jolly. Grandpa would talk your leg off and most of the time about something I knew nothing about. If he had been educated he could have been an engineer, he could fix and do just about anything. My grandmother lost her mother young and that may have been the cause of many of her oddities. She would not allow her grandchildren to spend the night in her home. She was a pack rat and once when my aunts cleaned her home it enraged her. She hid her last pregnancy from her children so it may also be possible that she suffered from a mental disorder, I suspect many people did in those days. I took the photo of my grandparents to the right when at a family get together at the old Lake Ft Smith Park.

Conley Horton O'Kelley and Zelma Azana Peters are my parents and it must be said that I had a troubled relationship most of my life with my parents. They devoted a great deal if not most of their lives and resources to their religion a

belief I did not share. I have over the years commented that if my parents had spent their time, money, and resources on their children that they invested in their faith, that their children would be much different men today. My parents probably had little choice, it is likely they were brainwashed as children and to try to appease their parents they just repeated what they were taught. My Aunt Mary in her book speaks about my grandfather Albert getting into arguments in Sunday School class but it wasn't just in Sunday School, it was not uncommon for heated arguments to break out at just about any O'Kelley gathering as one O'Kelley tried to out religion the other. I can recall more than one Christmas gathering in my O'Kelley grandparent's home where my grandfather and several of his sons would be in a circle in a heated argument and my grandfather would have his King James Bible open reading verses. I can not believe that any god would create something so complicated as to create such contention between family members. I can not believe that any god would desire his creation to put religion before their own children yet we have the story in the bible where Abram was prepared to cut the throat of his own son for his zealous religious beliefs. It is certain that this Irish American family knew nothing about the religious troubles of Ireland or they may have had a different view but it may also be because of those troubles that they had the view they had. When remembering the O'Kelleys who have past we must not forget that about a decade before the birth of William Kelley, our grandfather who came from Ireland to settle in America, the King James Bible protestants were killing every native Irish Catholic they could in Ireland, every man, every woman, and every child to make the world safe for them the King James Protestants, certainly a great many of our O'Kelley ancestors lost there lives as a result so clearly some of the religious fever from that time continues in the misunderstood devotion in the lives of the protestant O'Kelley descendants that live today. There are written records that in 1690 and 1691 as the common Irish labored in the fields they did not own the English Protestant would come upon them and shoot them or hang entire families for no other reason than they desired to posses the land and this is what continues to fuel the hate in Northern Ireland today and it is a story like the story of my father and his parents living in a dirt floor barn that has been forgotten.

My parents were not cruel in their religious beliefs but I am of the opinion that they put their faith and thus their own personal self interest before the betterment of their children. I missed more than one homework assignment because our church night was on Thursday night and I had to be in church with my parents rather than doing my work. That is not to say I did poorly in school because of this but it certainly did not help. Church came first before everything but it wasn't always that way in our family and while my Aunt Mary in her Heritage book says that my grandfather Albert valued education, four of his sons qualified for college under the GI Bill yet none went and I qualified for college also under the GI Bill but I too did not go mostly because education wasn't valued in the O'Kelley household, the only value in the O'Kelley family was church, faith, and the King James Bible. Our two children, first Shawn and then Ryan attended college and I am certain that is because Renee' and I broke the cycle of ignorance via religious domination and allowed them to find hope for their future giving them a reason to want to do better than their parents. Our children were not subjected to the preaching that Jesus was returning just any day, thus they did not believe they had no future and no reason to go to college.

I remember a time when my father didn't attend church, he liked to hunt, fish and just be in the woods. Mom would give him trouble about it but he would tell her he worked hard six days a week and Sunday was his only day off and he wanted to use it to do what he loved best. He would sometimes take my older brother along and we would spend our Sunday mornings in the woods near places he went when he was a boy. Being a TV cowboy I remember our father taking my older brother and our mother to the Ft Smith Rodeo, the only time in my life that I can recall going to the Rodeo and he took us there because Zorro was the main attraction, he did this for his children. When Zorro came out into the arena dad took us down to the fence so we could be close when Zorro road by. Those were the childhood adventures that children treasure the most with their parents so I tried to do the same with my children. When our oldest son was gone to a college in Mo, Renee' and I drove our youngest son, Ryan, who was about ten years old at the time to Tulsa to a Star Trek convention. We made certain he had money so he could buy some of the things he wanted, I remember he bought a copy of the screen play to the yet to be made movie "Generations". These snapshots of life were and still are important to Renee' and I as I suppose they are still to our children.

To fully understand the kind of world I grew up in as a child there came a time when I was in grade school about 1959 when tension in our world were so high that people really believed we might have an atomic war with Russia. The school sent home a form asking our parents to purchase dog tags for their children so in the event of war it would aid the survivors to identify our burnt and mangled little bodies. Is there little wonder so many of my generation suffer from drug addiction and depression today? From the stress and worry and all the chemicals and the radiation exposure from the bomb testing I am surprised we don't have more problems than we do but on the order form there was a box for religion and there were only two Christian groups, C for Catholic and P for everyone else. My father became a little irate proclaiming we were not protestants, we were Baptists, He really believed that the Baptist came from John the Baptist who were an entirely separate group from all other Christian groups and because I believe my father I believed such until well in adulthood when I learned the truth. I have no doubt that there will be some Southern Baptist who will read this and send me a nasty email because they believe as my father did. Ignorance abounds in religion and that is especially so in the southern United States, that is how they get converts.

Renee' and I were married for five years before first child was born. The Irish influence has Ryan, Renee', Shawn

always been with me, both our sons received Irish given names. We spent most all our time and a great deal of our money trying to give our children a better life than we experienced. I worked extra jobs, self educated myself in photography and computers so I could bring in extra income and while I missed out on a great many things because I was working I was content in knowing that my children were having the times of their lives with their mother doing that which mothers and children do. I didn't miss out on everything, having risen to the rank of Captain in a very short time, I was able to leverage my position as to allow me to do some things that I would not have been able to do in any other job. I attended a few school parties and I went with my son's class trips, one to Devil's Den driving my police unit so I could respond to any emergency call if needed. How many children can say that their father, the Chief of Investigator for the third largest county in Arkansas at that time took both the time and interest to escort their class on a field trip? My children can. I tried to give our children some of the fun I experienced as a child, but I wasn't my father, I couldn't build them a go cart like my father did for his sons, but I could buy them bikes, scooters, four wheelers, Shawn, Rick, Ryan

and motorcycles. And some of my payback came years later when as adults my older son and I have traveled close to a dozen times to national parks and other places to share our interest in both nature and photography and my younger son and I traveled to many guns shows sometimes with his grandfather Plum to explore our shared interest in guns and knives. Even as our children are adults, Renee' and I have continued to spent a great deal of our time and money doing things with our grown sons, things I wished my father could had done with me.

I did not raise my children in church. They did attend my childhood church a few times but I stopped even that when one Sunday visit they came out of Sunday School, lined up with the other little children in front of the church and sang their new song they were taught, "Stomp, Stomp, Stomp, the Devil" they sang with great vigor. Here I was a law enforcement officer trying to keep the peace and civility in our troubled world and my backward, ignorant, childhood Shawn, Ryan, Renee'

church was trying to turn my children into the kind of people who will judge others and stomp them if need be. I think my sons are better men today because they were not raised in church, my sons never knew what it was like to be terrorized each and every week for most of their childhood by backward and ignorant ministers. I did what every good father should do, I protected them from that abuse and I speak out now because I know there are other children who are being abused by religion.

I have a great many fond memories of our early family life. Christmas was once a very big deal in our home, Renee' made sure of that. I worked extra jobs so my family could have a big Christmas and I would sometimes spend 10% of our annual income on gifts for my wife and two sons. For more than a decade I worked a part time job as security at the local J C Pennys and between Christmas and Thanksgiving was very busy for me. I worked every Christmas Eve up until closing time which was normally 6 or 7 PM. I missed out on the cookie and candy making that Renee' and our sons engaged in but never the less I was a very important part as my family would anxiously await my arrival home, wait for me to take off my uniform and Renee' would put a freshly made warm cup of hot chocolate in my hand and the presents would be distributed and the frenzies would start. My joy came less in the gifts I received and more from the gifts I gave which I now know is also a common trait shared with many other afflicted with ADHD. But it was a grand time for all, one that like most everything else has passed as our children grew into manhood and they began their own Christmas traditions. So is the way of our world.

I did have the opportunity to take two trips with my father in his later years but during his Alzheimer. In 2006, he, my younger brother Dana, and his son, Neil traveled to Benton County to the Keith's place where my father was born. Dad still had much of his mind at that time and it was there on the porch of Mr Keith's home that I heard for the first time my father's story about how he like me was drafted by the Army but like me he decided to enlist in another branch of service, the US Navy. I asked my father how it came to be that farm boys enlisted in the Navy and my father told me that in the Navy you never had to sleep in a hole in the ground or eat cold food. On the way home I got to treat my father to his first Subway Sandwich, that is a very good memory worth being recording.

Later in 2007 my oldest son and I picked my father up at his home and took him to the Mount Magazine Lodge. It was in the gift shop for the first time that I saw first hand how my father's disease was taking him, my son and I were standing next to him and we were looking at a display when he suddenly looked up and walked away from us confused looking around like he was looking for a friendly face among strangers. I followed him and waited for what I thought was the right moment then walked up to him and began talking to him as if nothing had happened. A smile came upon his face and he was once again himself. In the last years of my father's life he was like a stop light. You never knew when the light was going to change and sometime he went from green to red without a yellow then back to green. My father died on my older brother's 59th birthday, such a sad way for anyone to go but at least with me in the end he was kind and gentle, the kind of father I always wanted him to be. I am not certain he was that way with my other brothers. My father spent most of his life in service to his God, but in his ending of his life, in the last few years, I can not say God did him a service.

I am certain our children will not view Renee' and I as perfect parents anymore that we viewed ours as such but once we are gone Ryan and Shawn, Pea Ridge Battle Field Park

Ryan and Shawn, Pea Ridge Battle Field Park

and they are left to tell their grandchildren about their parents, I think if they are honest with themselves they will have to admit that we tried to be the best parents we could possibly be given our limited resources and abilities and we did a pretty good job of it.

My aneurysm in 2008 has only added to the difficulties of our lives. Most of the friends and family believe it had no impact, that I am exactly as I was before my aneurysm but that could not be further from the truth. I hide most of what I experience from them mostly because I have learned during more that a half a century of life that while people will ask you how you are doing, they really are only doing so to be polite. They don't really care and don't want to be burdened with the troubles of others and maybe that is because they have troubles of their own. Perhaps my big hill to climb was the quilt and depression I felt when I came home. I suspect many people who survive a near death experience feel the guilt. A great deal of the guilty comes from the huge sums of money and resources were spent on me and that was soon followed by the feeling of not being worthy of a second chance at life. I wonder as I am sure many other survivors also wonder why wasn't someone who can do a great deal of good in our world saved in place of me? This was soon followed by depression so great that for maybe the first time in my life I considered ending my life. No one prepared me for any of it, nor was my family prepared and none of my doctors seem to be listening to me when I would try to express what I was feeling and it was only after I decided to turn to letter writing, the one talent that has never failed me, I wrote a letter and send it to my doctors tellng them how I felt and how I felt the joy had gone from my life. My letter got their attention and I began to receive treatments for the damage to my brain. At the age of 59 and burdened with the damage to my brain by my aneurysm working is all but impossible, I have tried over the past three years but I make mistakes daily that cost Renee' and I a great deal of money and my relationships that I have spent a lifetime to build have been greatly impacted mostly because people do not understand that who we are is determined by our brains and my brain received considerable trauma during my aneurysm. Any bad behaviors I had before have been magnified and I may actually have a few more. I often say and do things for which there is no explanation and while some might say, "well if you know you do them, then don't" but it isn't that easy. I no longer have the ability to think ahead, I believe they refer to this as executive function, it is what allows us to think a possible action through before doing it, I have lost that ability, I can only do one thing at a time and speaking and thinking about what I say is extremely difficult for me and most people are just unwilling to put up with it so they move on usually without me. I seem to still be able to write but maybe that is because I can read, correct, read again, correct, read again, correct and maybe somewhere in the process I have identified all the pitfalls in my wording as not to offend. A brain injury is no different from one loosing the use of their legs. Certainly all wheel chair bound people desire to walk but like a brain injured person the desire does not equal ability, I can't stop fix this, all I can do is try to find ways around it as much as possible, I can't repair my brain anymore than a wheel chair bound person can rise up and walk and most people can not understand this so my relationships have dwindled greatly since my aneurysm. That is just the way it is I suppose, certainly nothing I can do about it. Like my father my life appears to be ending very much the way it began, in great difficulty. I suppose I am just lucky to be alive although I must admit there are a great many times that I have wished my aneurysm had been fatal I know my wife and children would be better off.

I am a self made man, everything I have accomplished in my life I have done mostly with no aid or encouragement from others and it wasn't that I turned down the aid or encouragement, it was rarely offered if at all but I do find it interesting that many ADHD individuals follow this same model so maybe it has less to do with what is not offered and more to do with not accepting, that because I had to do it on my own, others just let me have my way. In my entire adult life my father gave me a single $5 bill to help with the costs of gas during the early 1970s. He signed two notes for me, the first that allowed me to purchase a used 1966 Mustang in 1970 and the other was a note he signed in 1973 that allow my wife and I to purchase a used mobile home in Blytheville Arkansas, both notes I paid in full. Over the years my parents loaned us a black and white TV, a dryer, and a sewing machine. My father-in-law gave us money in 1986 to help us pay for a septic system when we built our home but certainly this was for his daughter, that aid would not have come to me if we were not married. These are not complaints, this is just how most of my generation made it and my parents likely received far less as did their parents. I doubt that my father-in-law received money to aid him in the building his home so every generation has improved the lot and treatment of the next and that is how it should be.

I have a wide variety of interest, in 1989 my wife and I took a ten day motorcycle trip with another couple to Florida and in 1991 we flew to Jamaica, 1992 honoring a promise to my wife we took a seven day cruise on the Majesty of the Seas and in 1999 Renee' and I went to the to the Turks and Caicos Islands. Renee' and I have been on many motorcycle trips a great many of them combined with shopping, dinners, and overnight stays in fine hotels we have lived more in our lifetime than most couples would live in two. I am learning Gaelic and I like exploring our world, digesting history, visiting museums, art galleries, book stores, public libraries, I love to read mostly classics and very old books that Google has made available for free although my aneurysm has made it impossible for me to concentrate long enough to read a book from cover to cover like I once could do. I love driving the back roads and walking in the woods, plains, and deserts of our world. I am not a hiker or climber such as my older son Shawn, a 5 mile easy hike is the limit of my abilities. I enjoy recreational photography, attending movies, I like music, and plays. One of the best experiences of my life was when my wife and I traveled to Owasso a few years back where the High School put on a performance of Guys and Dolls, my expectations were low but the performance was first class, equal to any of the commercial productions I have seen and even now we still sometimes make the trip to Owasso to enjoy the school concerts which our oldest son conducts some of the selections. Almost twenty years ago I influenced my wife to appreciate British movies, The Christmas Carol became a favorite so when the play came to the Walton Art Center in the mid 1990s I bought tickets and took my family. I also took my family to Little Rock in 95 to the Elton John and Billy Joel concert, I have tried to be a good father and a good husband. Since that time I also influenced Renee' in her affection for "Are you being served" and "Hercule Poriot". My wife and I have have seen Mama Mia, the Pirates of Pensant, and the Blue Man Group. She traveled in 2001 to the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City and in 2007 to the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City and hiking at the Oklahoma Tallgrass Prairie but I have traveled with my oldest son Shawn to Oklahoma Route 66 Museum, National Route 66 Museum, Four Corners, Monument Valley three times, Coral Pink Sands Utah State Park, Great Salt Lake, Dinosaur National Monument, Arches twice, Mesa Verda, Grand Canyon, Verde Canyon Railroad, Antelope Canyon, White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, Guadalupe Mountains, Palo Duro, Canyonlands, Canyon de Chelly, Natural Bridge National Monument, Valley of the Gods, Moki Dugway, Hovenweep National Monument, Rocky MT National Park, Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, Abe Lincoln Museum (twice) and home, Tallgrass Prairie (three times), the Great Smokey Mts, Stone Mt Georgia, National Cowboy Hall of Fame, Nelson Atkins Museum, Forest Park Museum, and countless other adventures and we hope to travel to Ireland in the future. I encouraged Renee' to travel by train with Shawn to Santa Fe New Mexico. The one activity that I don't enjoy is shopping, I have certainly done a great deal of it to appease my wife but now that I am older not so much but sadly that is the solitary activity that my wife and younger son enjoy so I do not get to have that many shared experiences with them like I have with my older son or like I was able to share with my family when our sons were children. My wife and younger son do not share my older son and my broad interest in the world around us if it doesn't bear a price tag and can be taken home they are not interested, so I am normally left behind to sit with the dogs when they make their many trips to the mall to buy more stuff that eventually gets donated to the Salivation Army or thrown out. I have been on many shopping trips with them throughout my life, I just don't enjoy them and only do them when it is required to keep the peace in our family, they feel no obligation to return my favor and rarely do. Both my older son and I have tried to spark their interest in activities other than shopping but unsuccessfully however I was able to persuade my wife and younger son to accompany me and our older son to the St Louis Arch father's day weekend 2010 the only time since our sons have become men that I can remember that my wife and both sons went somewhere together with me other than to a shopping mall or to dinner, I find that sad but it is not within my power to change. There were no such trips father's day 2011.

So at the time of this post, September 5, 2011 Renee' and I are in the process of closing our business as I can no longer

run it. Renee' has been forced to take full time employment elsewhere. I am after 59 years have begun treatment for my ADHD symptoms. Our oldest son Shawn O'Kelley graduated the University of Arkansas in 2000 with a degree in Music and is one of several band directors for Owasso Public Schools in Oklahoma, he is not married. Beginning in 2002 he and I have travel many a thousand of miles to National Parks and other places of interest and shared many father and son moments together. Our youngest son, Ryan O'Kelley began to work in the family business when he was fifteen and did so for more than a decade as it took a bit longer to decide what he wanted to do in life, it took him longer to complete his education, but he graduated at Des Moines Medical University in May of this year as a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine. He is married to Brandi Holt and they have no children, only a pack of dogs that they treat as children. He does not share the interest that I share with my older son but he and I have attended many guns shows. His bond is stronger with his mother who he prefers to go shopping with, like all children ours are alike in many ways and different in many more. As for me, I struggle daily with the results of my childhood, my life, and my aneurysm and my many ADHD symptoms. I am not certain about what is in store for what remains of my of my life. I have done a great many things, accomplished much, probably far more than the average person, I have lived more experiences than my children will every experience. How many people can say they carried and shot a full auto Thompson Machine gun, or M60, UZI, MP5, or a suppressed weapon, conducted lie detection test, or had their photographs and testimony accepted as evidence in a capital murder case, resulting in convict and death row, or single handed setup and configured one of the first Internet businesses in Arkansas, Most who visit the Empire State Building do not know that there is another level above where they are allowed, the very top where the Airship Dock is located, in June of 1977 I was allowed inside that tiny dock and ten years later a once in a life time motorcycle trip for ten days that took my wife and I from Fayetteville Arkansas to St Petersburg Florida and back. I can speak about these experiences and a lot more so maybe this should be enough but it doesn't seem to be so and the feeling of living an unaccomplished life appears to also be an ADHD symptom so driven to always try to accomplish more I have set out to use my skills and experiences as a homicide investigator to solve the case of just who were my ancestors and learn if we still have living relations in Ireland. I have set out to know more about how my ancestors lived and died and to try to record those experiences for all time and leave a legacy to those who come after me so they will know that our ancestors did much more than live and die, they faced many hardships that they over came to give us a chance at a better life than they experienced. In reaching higher in life we share our successes with our ancestors as each generation is held up a bit higher.

As we come to the close of the year 2011 and I reflect, it has been a very difficult year for me. My brain injury finally caught up with me. I was forced to face that I could no longer do my job, that the business that I had single handedly put together and with the aid of my wife operated for the past 16 years, through good economic times as well as the bad, that I wasn't able to maintain it since my aneurysm so I was forced to close our office. This year also led me to a great many discoveries about myself as while trying to learn if there was anything that I could do about my short term memory problems that I believed resulted from my aneurysm it was discovered that what I really struggled with is ADHD and it is likely I have struggled with it all my life. Either by genetics or my heavy exposure to lead during the first five years of my life, I had always known that I was not like everyone else, I had to struggle when everyone around me seem to coast. Somehow some way I managed to finish High School, excel in the Air Force, excel in my Law Enforcement Career, completed a two year program in Computer Systems Analysis at NTI at mid life, and maintain a business for the past 16 years. My doctor told me that it is likely that due to my intelligence that I figured out ways to succeed and overcome the impact ADHD had over my life. Now that I know and looking back I can recall there have been times that ADHD ruled me and I did not rule it. I did not know the true reasons why but most of my life I have had to find solutions to things that caused me problems. Decades ago when I finally accept that I could not manage our family finances I chose to turn it all over to my wife and I never looked back and she did what I could not do. I found a great many solutions like this to get around the difficulties that ADHD has placed in my way and I did it without knowing that it was ADHD that was causing me the troubles, I sought out solutions because I accepted I could not do many things that others seemed to be able to do. I have been untreated all my life and I think my family would agree that since my aneurysm my shortcomings are magnified and they have created more problems, my aneurysm made my ADHD worse. Likely because of the impact my untreated ADHD now has upon me, for the first time since 1974 my wife and I spent Thanksgiving apart and I spent Thanksgiving alone because my wife nor my two sons desired to be with me. I gave up a great deal of my life so my wife and two sons could have the life each of them enjoys today. I gave of my time and my labor so my family could have the opportunities I never had and now they appear to have no time for me and that has been a bitter pill to swallow. My life and position today in my family is much different from the days when I was so important to our family that they would wait patiently for me to arrive home and begin the opening of our presents each Christmas Eve. Now most often I find that my position in our family is to sit the dogs while everyone else goes shopping. I always thought that if I loved and cared for my family that in the ending of my life I would have a place as a loved, honored, and respected family elder but that isn't how my life has played out; apparently my family has a different view of my contribution because at my youngest son's medical school graduation this year, I was the one family member who my son chose not to invite. Nothing I can do about it, what is done is done.

I think most people who know me will say they never saw any indicator that I may have been ADHD, I believe 99.9% of the time I have been mostly normal, I think most will say that I have been a loving, caring, and devoted husband to my wife and a father to our two children. ADHD is not like being blind or deaf, a great many people do not accept it as a brain disease because they can not see it and I was one of those persons; for a great deal of my life I believed ADHD was just an excuse for an undisciplined life but as I read the symptoms that I shared when I was an untreated Adult ADHD I am also reading about my life because my experiences have been very much the same as many others who also are ADHD. I now know it is a real brain disease and one that I can not just choose to do differently, it is not a matter of will power or choice, it is a matter of sometimes not being able to make the right choice and that too is not something most people can accept or understand.

I do not appear to be the typical ADHD person, two years after my aneurysm I did not know the reason why but I knew something was wrong and I sought help from my doctor, and I am now taking one of the recommended medications and seeking other treatments. I am determined to find ways to manage my ADHD and not allow it to become an excuse. It is only an explanation as to why I do some of the things I do and why I do them the way I do but it is not an excuse to do them. Even now that this knowledge has come to me late in life I reflect that most of my life I have not allowed my disease that was unknown to me to have great influence over me or my family. I do not smoke, drink, use drugs, gamble, or cheat on my wife all activities that many ADHD suffers sometimes fall prey to. I have lived and still live a respectable, disciplined, and very self controlled life always devoted to the betterment of my wife and two sons but I am determined that the year 2012 will be different for me and I will never spend another Thanksgiving alone.