My first cousin, who in 1970 was in his 3rd week of basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, contracted meningitis and died a week later along with 14 other of our servicemen. Seeing as he was from Amarillo, I'm sure he would have chosen his home town over that particular army post. But, as a teenager, my mother would check the mileage of my car after a late Saturday night and accuse me of " sneaking over to Amarillo." She thought the town was the den of iniquity full of young women with loose morals waiting to entrap her baby boy.
