Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What is the first thing you remember?

watching my mother wash clothes in the creek below the house i was born in. must have been 2.

That stuff sure smells good. How'd it taste ?

Doing my version of water boarding my younger brother in a wading pool

Todd dont swim till this day

Told him many decades ago why.

Fugg him.......

Scars that dont heal....

Moving into a new house[I was bout 2-1/2] wanting to help carry stuff upstairs but they wouldn't let me. Also remember a party of sorts in the backyard of that same house, the first summer there I guess.

I must have been about 3 when our next door neighbors had a 55 Chevy convertible. She was friends with my mom and they would take it out and go driving with the top down occasionally,...put me in the back seat. I always enjoyed that even though I was so small that I couldn't see over the seat in front of me.

I can't remember the woman's name by she was a very pleasant sort. She'd occasionally look over her shoulder and ask, "Is that too much wind on you?" I'd shake my head "no",.....and my mom would say, "He's alright".

Hell,I forgot!

I must've been between two and two and a half years old. Mom, Dad and I had been somewhere in our car, came home, walked in the door and there in our living room sitting on the coffee table was a cardboard cutout toy circus set up with little animals, clowns, big top, ringmaster, etc. I'd never seen anything so wonderful.

Around the same age too my mom's brothers and a couple of their friends taking me 'coon hunting with them one night. I remember them carrying me on their shoulders and laughing at having me sing, "I Don't Care if the Sun Don't Shine, I'll get My lovin' in the Evenin' Time". I don't know who had more fun, me or them.

I also remember riding the city bus at around three by myself to the babysitter's house. Small town, everybody knew everybody, Mom put me on the bus, I sat right behind the bus driver, he knew where to let me off, the babysitter's kids, all high school age met me at the bus stop right in front of their house. Mom or dad picked me up.

The earliest thing I can remember was being held by someone, in a cool dim cavern type place with the sound of water dripping. There was some green wooden stairs and banisters there also. Fast forward 20 plus years, I take my new bride to the Bandera Volcano and Ice Cave and I'm hit with Deja Vu and I see the remnants of green wooden stairs and banisters. My dad was still alive then so I asked him if we had ever been there. He produced a picture taken in 1955 of my grandmother holding me, standing on the green wooden stairs at the Ice Cavern.

I was 14 months old at the time.

One of my earliest vivid memories was of my father shooting a squirrel. We were visiting my grandparents and gramps told dad they were having trouble with squirrels getting in the attic. A little while later dad saw a squirrel in a tree next to the house. He grabbed gramps shotgun out of the closet and went out and blasted that squirrel. I remember it seemed really loud and I thought it was cool as hell. I think I was probably 2-3 years old at the time.

Lucky you.......

I remember coming home at night from somewhere with my parents and my older brother had fallen asleep in the car so my dad layed him down on the couch while they got situated. I remember the couch, the furniture, everything. Just a memory I never tried to analyze so many years went by. My mom found an old photo album that we were looking through together and I see a family photo of them in that living room. It hit me, and I told my mom I remembered that room and the night we came home etc. My mom looked at me and said that she was about 7 or 8 months pregnant with me when they moved out of that house, and that I never saw that house. Twilight zone chit.

Sticking my thumb in Moms ringer washing machine on the side porch of the little cabin we lived in at HWY 10 and Higgenbotham Rd. circa 1966, I was three.

I was 3 1/2. My mom locked us out of our apartment and she was crying because she didn't have enough money to buy milk for my sister on her first birthday. Mom and Dad had moved to Montana for a job with mom's uncle. He turned out to be an alcoholic who would be on a binge for a couple weeks at a time. No job, no money except what dad could pick up working wherever he could. Part time pumping gas, etc.

I have many memories, but can't tie any specific event to a specific age. More of them are "snapshots" rather than "movies".

Bacon. Age 2.

Then at 2 1/2 i fell off the pier at Palacios into the bay. Mom dove in and grabbed me. Then coming to having artificial resuscitation laying on the pavillion hardwood floor.

We lived in a two room house on the Triangle Ranch. The cowboys had to ride right in front of our house when leaving or coming back to the corral. I opened the front yard gate and ran ito the road when I heard, or saw, them coming in. Daddy reached down and got me by the arm and swung me up in front of him and let me ride to the saddle shed.

I was a couple months shy of three years old, and it’s my first memory that could be tied to a particular time.

I did that when I was around four, I had my entire arm in the damn thing before they got it shut off. It was bouncing off my face. Haven’t though if that in years.
I still cringe when I see one

LOL, that's it, full power to boot, mom was standing close, shut it off, and got my thumb outta there, and yes, it hurt like hell, those rollers are soft rubber, no? she ran em through after the wash cycle then hung it all out on clothes lines in the yard, I remember our big german shepherds running and jumping around through and the bed sheets on the line in the warm breezy days.

About 3 years old I remember staying up late with mom to watch the Honeymooners waiting for dad to get home from work. Mom used to buy me those French fries that come in a can like Pringle’s for our late night Honeymooners-wait for dad fest and I can remember it like yesterday. Also about 3 years old mom and I went to the five and dime and bought a couple of strings of Christmas lights to put on the railing outside the house we lived in at the time and when I woke up the next morning some older kids down the street had cut them. I was so mad but my grandpa fixed them. Also the same age there was a fully involved structure fire and mom and I went over to bring ice and water to the firemen. I was captivated by their toughness and bravery and from that moment on I wanted to be a firefighter.

I had a great childhood and a great family full of love and discipline. I only wish that I could’ve had more time with my grandpa and my mom because you couldn’t find two people more full of love for their family than those two amazing people.

Just in general,...we weren't dirt poor or anything like that. But there wasn't much money for extras, especially early on.

I have lots of memories of living in a little house next door to my grandparents that didn't have running water while my dad was building our house on another piece of property about a half mile away.

I turned 4 in that house. It sat on 3 acres and I had the run of it. It was bordered by a deep, dry western Kentucky creek on 2 sides.

My father and grandfather would be off at work and my mother and grandmother were usually involved doing the chores of the day and I just wandered around the place exploring.

Even though I was little more than a toddler, it ranks as one of the happiest years of my life.

Run around the place all day free as a bird,....spoiled rotten by both my mother and grandmother,...vanilla ice cream anytime I wanted it, and when night came we'd sit in the dark watching a B&W TV while eating popcorn until bedtime.

In my four year old mind,...when I bothered to think about it at all, I thought life would be like that forever.

It was all I knew and it was all I needed to know.

Even the good times I experienced later in life can't compare to that year running free, loosely supervised, on my grandparents property when I was 4 years old.