1st Cavalry Division Cap

Me and my 1st Cavalry Division cap.

Pirate Patty

My wife, Patricia Ann Custer Lincoln, of 62 years with a stye in her eye.
Eventually went to hospital for double vision in one eye.

Chris and me when they came up to see us for a few days.

Me going-on 83.

Thinking about it?

It was 61º outside this morning when I left the dog outside to do his business. He got in bed with me at 2:00 am and got up at 6:00 when I got up. He went outside while I did my breathing treatment. It was warm and had rained but wasn't raining when I got up. I cut most of my beard off last night and thinned what is left so it looks better.

Pat and Abe

Christmas Eve at Sonny and Eva's get together

Good Luck

I could and did spend hours looking in a patch of clover for a single 4-leaf clover. But in my lifetime I may have seen one or two.

My mother, Vivia,  would come out and look at the same clover and reach down and pull off a 4-leaf clover. I was always astonished. She said it would give us some good luck.

I know we grew all the food we ate because we had no money to buy food with. When we needed something like a pound of coffee or a stick (quarter pound) of butter I would have to take a dozen of fresh eggs to the store to trade for the butter. Sometimes we traded eggs for a pound of bacon or coffee. We sold some eggs and used those pennies to buy things at the store and often mother would give me a dime (10 cents) to go to the post office for a couple of postal cards or some stamps for letters. If there was any leftover money she would tell me I could buy some candy. For pennies, during the War Years, the candy case was empty but they always had a bad tasting chocolate drops. Instead of them I would get a handful of Spanish peanuts.

Lung Collasped

I had both lungs collapse ten years apart. You feel like you are going to suffocate and would if you can't get air into the chest cavity for them to re-inflate, you die of suffocation. So it is a serious thing for anyone to have happen to them.

This is an example of the scar, under my left arm that led into my chest where they stuck a tube with a one-way valve on it. It would let new air in but no air from the chest could come out.

When the lung healed and was able to hold air, I was allowed to go home.

Fly, Ant Eating Pear

I call this Two For One or the Fly and Ant eating the Pear slice. I saw it and switched lenses to 18mm and took a couple of shots, I got close enough laying down on my stomach to get the picture and sometimes the lens hood would touch the fly and it would fly away but return almost immediately. So, this shot was planned and not a kind of happy accident where you get more than you saw as in this example.

Warnke Covered Bridge

The Warnke Covered Bridge near our town and still being used today. The logs used to span the creek were cut from the trees that stood around the spot where the bridge was built. There were covered bridge building specialists who cut the logs, shaped them and used them to build these covered bridges. The name of the bridge builder is usually the name given to the bridge. "Warnke"

Brubaker Covered Bridge

The Brubaker Covered Bridge is a beautiful bridge and still in use. I have painted this bridge many times beginning back in the days when the kids at home were still small. They seemed to enjoy walking across the bridges and peering through the openings to see the stream flowing past them.

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Rainy Day Cardinal

Cardinal on a rainy day--looking like he is tired of the rain. I think these are among the most colorful birds that we have. This and the yellow birds we call the Goldfinch. The male is brilliant yellow with leading edge of wings a coal black. The female cardinal has the same basic shape but her colors are more muted and not so bold as the male. They have a cock on the top of their heads that can be raised and lowered as it is in this snapshot.

Geeting Covered Bridge

The Geeting Covered Bridge. Notice that this bridge does not have any open sides. It was made this way so farmers could drive herds of cattle or sheep across the bridge without them being able to see the water below. Usually an animal will not cross or walk on a bridge if it can see water under it.

Hummingbird Moth

Hummingbird Moth in flight. They are small but about the same size as a smaller hummingbird and have all the actions in flight as the real hummer. I like them around the flowers.

Daddy Long Legs Spider

Daddy Long legs perched on a peony waiting for the first insect to come along. They are supposed to have a nasty bite but it is almost impossible for them to bite a human being.

Pepper Jax

Pepper Jax stopped to take a look at me. We just got him from the animal shelter in Greenville, Ohio and he was still exploring the backyard and running wild and leaping high up and over bushes and shrubs. And, he loved chasing birds and squirrels. He actually caught one bird and killed it. He is getting older now and we give him too many snacks and he is a little porkier than he was when this picture was taken, but we still love him just as much as always.

Honeysuckle

Honeysuckle in bloom here in Ohio where we live. The fragrance of the flowers attracts a lot of insects but also it attracts our Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds. To make sure they stay around here, and that there is plenty to eat, my wife also prepares some sweet water and puts it in a hummingbird feeder where they come to feed. This season we have only had one pair of hummingbirds. Some years we have had two or three pairs and they were always fighting over whose territoty the feeder was on.

Gordon School Reunion

The 1995 Gordon School Reunion that I had for anyone who had gone to the country school shown here, that I had gone to. We had well over 125 people show up from as far away as California and Florida. Some of these people I knew about and knew where they lived in Gordon but I had never seen them in person before. This is part of the group who came forward for a group picture. I am on the far right side. Marion Gunder is in the wheelchair and his sister, Shirley Stamps in standing behind him. Both are now deceased. In fact, most of the people in the photo have passed on.

Coopers Hawk

I have about five thousand photos of Coopers Hawks in my collection. All of the photographs were taken of the hawks when they flew into my backyard here in Brookville, Ohio. At first I think they were attracted to the variety of birds that were here every day to eat the seeds I put out for them using a variety of bird feeders. But they continued to come for years and then they stopped showing up. Occasionally one might slip over the roof and swoop down at my bird feeder hanging from the oak tree but they seldom got any birds. Nowadays, it is rare for me to see a Coopers Hawk on my board fence in my backyard. I assume they moved on as family ideals changed and waiting for birds was not as exciting as catching them on the wing. This one is an immature hawk and has traditional yellow eyes. Also the pattern is made up of larger splotches with lots of white between each tear drop shape of color. The adult Coopers Hawks have a distinctive wild-looking pattern of feathers and their eyes are red.

Melissa

Melissa May, our baby, posing for the photograph. She is a RN (Registered Nurse) now and had one daughter, Audrey, who is able to drive their car around everywhere. They lived with us for about 6 years which was when they were making a transition to a life on their own. Melissa went to school and became a Registered Nurse. It is hard for me to look at her and understand that this was long ago when she was a baby. Audrey, our granddaughter, is bigger than her mom, so it seems odd for them to stop in because Audrey is a teenager and growing more each day. I think she is already taller than her mom.

Fried Squirrel

Squirrel grabbed the wrong wire and then grounded himself and was fried instantly. His dead body hung there for a very long time and after several months, his grip was gone and he fell to the ground.

My First Apple Computer

This dates me. It was my first computer. An Apple II Plus and a monitor to match. It was expensive but in those days I bought whatever i wanted because all i had to do was think about how I was going to pay for it and then I would do that, get paid and pay for the new whatever it was. I did really like this computer because you could actually show real pictures on it if you had them on those large A-size flopping disks. I know I also had an HP and you could only work on it in DOS.

Me and My Straw Hat

I got the idea to wear my straw hat in the house while in my PJs and this is the result. A lot of people have seen this picture, over the years and marvel at what I do and wonder what is coming up?

I never have gone naked outside and that is more than some of my neighbors' can say. Lots of them used to brag about which neighbor they went to bed with last night. The idea of tossing your house keys on the table and then go home to see who is sleeping with you is one for the books. I never did it but wonder what all I missed--if anything.

Newspaper Stories

I used to write a weekly newspaper column for the Brookville Star and I did columns for the Dayton Daily News and the Greenville Advocate. One of the stories was Hula Hoops and Pet Rocks--recalling these items were sold at Rickes Department Store when it was located in the then new Salem Mall. That particular story is show in this photograph. I also did artwork for magazines, newsletters and newspapers. But most of my art work was done for magazines. I remember one of the last pieces of cover art was for a magazine named "Forests" and they featured the giant redwoods of California that I had drawn and sold to them. I sometimes wish we would have had computers, what stories I could then tell.

Coopers Hawk

After a tour of duty in the Army, my new wife and I moved to Gordon next door to the house where I was born. We had four small rooms in what had been Tommy Rice’s old blacksmith shop. We needed a larger house.

Mature Coopers Hawk

I looked around and we bought the first house sold on Ankara Avenue in Brookville, Ohio. We moved a few days before Christmas in 1962.

This new property came without birds, bees, bugs and four legged creatures. To change that we used drapery panels, like sacks, and filled them with leaves collected from ditches near the city park, and ran over them with the new rotary mower to break the leaves into smaller pieces.

I used a rotary tiller to plow the dirt and leaves together. We waited over winter for the backyard to mellow and after planting grass seed the next spring; it sprouted and grew into a fabulous lawn.

Juvenile Coopers Hawk

I had taken a lot of pictures when I was in Japan but never really saw a bird in Japan. One day a beautiful juvenile hawk perched on my board fence in Brookville. I was stunned to see this magnificent Coopers Hawk (my knees actually shook). I walked outside and began talking to the hawk, and as I got closer to him I was afraid he could hear my heard thumping and fly away. But he didn't fly and I was always talking in a low voice as if he could understand everything I was saying. I didn't have a zoom lens or a telephoto lens, so I had to get close to get a nice picture.

I ended up getting almost 30 photographs and when I uploaded them into my computer and looked at them I was dumbfounded. They were just perfect—I could see every single piece of his feathers and his eye shined like a jewel. I was hooked once more on calligraphy. One of these is at the left.

Give Me Air

At the time this picture was taken, I was not on oxygen yet. Those were the days when I could still work outside, digging up flowers or planting trees and bushes. I could walk all around my backyard without my leg muscles feeling like I had just walked up the side of a mountain. Now I have COPD with both emphysema and asthma so almost everything bothers me in one way or another related to breathing. Some days I can not walk farther than from my chair to the toilet and back without being exhausted from a lack of oxygen. Now with a cannula 24/7 I am able to get along OK.