I Am ... I Said

For some time during the last years of my federal service, I thought about writing this book when I retired. My principal motivation for taking on such a task was realizing that our children really didn’t know much about me—how I grew up, my childhood experiences, what made me the way I am, or how I think on many topics. They don’t know much about my family either. My parents moved from Nebraska to California in 1961, a year after we moved to Washington DC; and they usually visited no more than once a year, if that often. And I never took my family to California. My father died when our oldest was fifteen and the youngest nine; and my mother passed on five years later. My mother did live near us in Virginia for most of her last five years, so the children had an opportunity to be around her and get to know her better than they did their grandfather.