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Verne Laing APPENDIX Some
of these early boyhood friendships extended not only through boyhood but also
through high school, Demolay, college and college fraternities (although I must
admit that I was a very poor fraternity man because I was always somewhat of a
loner and resented the curiosity and undue interest that other members had in my
activities, which I felt were none of their business).
A few of these friendships have extended to the present time. Through
the years since we all graduated from high school in about 1924, I have
continued to correspond with Bob Laing(no relation but exactly two weeks to the
day older that I,, who became City Manager of Alliance until his retirement),
also three or four other close friends in Alliance, perhaps the principal ones
being Cliff Gregory, Frank Mounts, Alton Mote who remained in Alliance; Paul
Thompson who roomed with me for part of a semester at the University of Nebraska
until he received his appointment to West Point where he made an excellent
record and subsequently became a Brigadier General at the time of World War II,
was severely injured at Omaha Beachhead on the D-Day invasion, after which he
became the European representative for Readers Digest in Paris and later a Vice
President of the Readers Digest Association at Pleasanton, New York; Parker
Davis became a civil engineer laying out air bases for the Air Force.
I could go on and on about these early boyhood friendships which have
continued to the present time. Oh,
I must mention Howard Cogswell who was my prize student.
I taught him how to play the trumpet, and he played his way through
college and medical school with dance bands and wound up as perhaps the leading
surgeon in Tucson, Arizona. We were
in and out of his home so often, which was between my home and school or town,
that his nice family, particularly his vivacious mother, wielded a tremendous
influence on my life and my outlook on life. By
all means, I must not overlook Horace (Shorty) Fuller, who lived next door
before we moved out to the edge of town. Shorty
was about four years or so older than I and it was he who argued with me and
tried to convince me that mothers had babies, that they didn't just happen to
arrive by stork or in a doctors handbag that he always carried with him on house
calls. (Which were not unusual in those days.) My dadd did not think that Shorty
would ever finish high school because he took up smoking cigarettes, and
according to my dadd hardly anyone who smoked cigarettes, which were a rather
new thing just beginning to become popular, ever finished high school.
Shorty fooled him and wound up working for the Los Angeles School Board
until retirement. Fifty
years later Shorty and his wife Sue were wonderful to my mother, practically
looking after her when she was in a convalescent home there in.
California far away from her own children. Shorty and I never did lose touch through the years and my
mother and I were sitting in his living room in Los Angeles watching TV when the
first man stepped foot on the moon. I
would like to know what ever happened to such fellows as Jack Young, Monk
Overman, Art Lunn and the others who moved away from Alliance.
Copyright
© 1999, 2000 Verne Laing. "I,
Witness to History" and logo are trademarks of Wesley Retirement
Communities, Inc., d/b/a Larksfield Place. All rights reserved.
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