StoryWorth

I started playing golf when I was about thirteen years old. I bought myself a few golf clubs and one of my Dayton Daily newspaper route customers took me to Kitty Hawk Golf Course to get me started.  I really liked playing sports of all types, so in some ways, this was just another one to try, but it was watching Jack Nicklaus playing on TV that provided the real spark. Jack was the longest hitter on tour, but his ability to hit long irons was especially exciting.  Probably because I wanted to “be like Jack”, I’m pretty good at hitting a 3-iron, unlike most men my age that have four or five woods in their bag to avoid the longer irons.  Two of my original clubs were Jack Nicklaus signatures, including the wedge I still use, having had it re-shafted and regripped numerous times.  Not many people have a fifty-three-year-old club in their bag. Most of what I learned about golf came from those TV broadcasts and the rest by playing lots of rounds over the years.  The...

As best as I can recall, I bought my first car during my freshmen year at Wright State University, so that’s most likely early in 1975.  I had used my mother’s big yellow Chevrolet station wagon, but really needed my own car so Mom didn’t have to go without as much.  I had a modest amount of cash saved, less than one thousand dollars, so I searched for something no more than that and found a light blue Opel Kadett with a manual transmission offered by a guy on Greenmount Boulevard in Oakwood that looked like a good fit.   While not that many young men at the time could drive a stick shift, I had taught myself that art on my older brother Greg’s Chevy Vega, not that it was a very smooth process.  I remember grinding the gears, drifting backward a bit when starting up a hill, and the many times I stalled the car and listened to the car horns of unappreciative drivers.  I knew the drill.  Rev the engine a bit, let out the clutch until it starts to grab, a...

I asked myself this very question two and a half years ago and wrote my younger self the following letter and published it on my Life Experiences blog on my sixty-third birthday.  I don’t think I can say it any better now. ------ October 8, 2018 To: Paul Moorman @ 18 From: Paul Moorman @ 63 Dear Self, Happy birthday! If the theories we’ve learned about time travel are true, you will never be able to read this letter, but in case this does somehow fall into your hands, I’ll try not to give too much of our future away. But hey, now that you know you’ve made it to our sixty-third birthday, maybe I’ve given too much away already, but I’ll try to be careful. You’ve already figured out that the co-ed Chaminade-Julienne is really different than our all-male Chaminade. You’ll get through it and have stories to tell the rest of our life. College will be much better. We’ll really hit our stride. The simple message of this letter is “don’t change a thing”. Not that life won’t throw us curve b...

Easter is the celebration of Jesus rising from the dead and a cherished holiday, its only rival being Christmas.  The entire family would dress up in their best clothes, attend Mass at Our Lady of Mercy and go out for brunch.  Our family did not eat out very often so that in and of itself was special.  It’s also a kind of unofficial start to spring, so by Easter, the days were getting longer, temperatures warmer and we were a couple of months away from our summer break from school.   A day or two before Easter my siblings and I would get to color a few eggs for the Sunday afternoon hunt and deciding what color, or better yet, colors to use caused much deliberation.  A hard-boiled egg would be suspended on a copper wire which was bent to hold the egg on its bottom half.  If one color was desired, the egg would be carefully rolled off the wire at the bottom of the glass of dye where it would lay submerged, soaking up the dye.  The dye started out as...

I was a pretty good student and really didn’t have all that much trouble with any of the classes I took through high school. I remember that early on I was very good at handwriting and spelling and would compete regularly with two girls in my class for who was the best. Math and science were always interesting to me and I would apply myself in those subjects the most. I was serious about school and for my entire third grade, if memory serves me correctly on the grade, I finished all my homework assignments in the minutes I had between one class and the next, never taking anything home. The only issue I had in grade school was my fourth-grade teacher, Sister Terrance, who had an issue with the top ten or so children in her class, and that was told to me by my father after a parent-teacher conference. He said to behave but agreed she was a piece of work. In college, I managed a 3.84 GPA, basically five A’s for every B, and nothing less than a B, although it was close in English an...

There are a lot of choices to pick from with my Dad having two brothers and three sisters and my Mom having three sisters and one brother, not counting the oldest brother she never knew, who died before he turned five months old.  But the choice of favorite has to go to my Aunt Loretta, my Mom’s next oldest sister and six years her senior.  Like my Mom, Aunt Loretta was a very kind person and was always willing to sit down and have a chat.  Perhaps she is my favorite because we share the same birthday, October 8, and that somehow made her extra special. Loretta married Joe Ryan and had five children.  Pat and Larry were much older than I was, but their two daughters, Mary and Nancy, were fairly close in age and are two of my favorite cousins.  Sadly, their first daughter, Barbara Ann, died ten days after being born.  It seems so sad, but losing a child was common back then.  Perhaps Grandpa Maurice and Grandma Clara helped her through her grieving, hav...