Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Why do you live where you do??

Grew up in ND. Went to school in CO. Wound up in Lubbock, TX for work and eventually ended up in the Houston area. That was in ‘92 - never intended to stay this long but here I am. I have a work team that I
Lead who is primarily based in the Houston area so moving is not likely in the near term. I’m not really enamored with the outdoors options nearby but have a great network of friends who would do anything possible to help should a need ever arise. Likewise my work team is a driven and talented bunch that is for the most part easy to lead. At some point I hope to end up in CO at least part of the time.

Just lucky...I guess.


But later this year we will ramp it up and move to either Tasmania or Ararat Vic.

Whichever suits us best.

I am plugging for Tassie for the trout and deer.

Most likely, it is just bad luck that I'm here.

Good to see you posting again.

Got back from Africa, thought to get a degree in Agriculture and take it back overseas. I wanted to get away from NY State laws and go where most people don’t so I applied in person up and down the Plains States, N. Dakota to Texas. It was February again, dropped off a pickup truck load of blankets and winter clothing from churches in NY to Pine Ridge SD en route. Turns out Texas had the best program.

I found agricultural research excruciatingly boring, knew I wasn’t gonna use it, but finished out my degree. Got into motorcycles while there, made Texas Redneck friends I still have 35 years later. I decided I was gonna go teach somewhere inner city, close enough to Mexico/Central America that I could travel down there to places in the sticks.

Came to San Antonio, found that San Antonio doesn’t do inner-city Hell, it only does inner city lukewarm. First summer I spent three weeks in Oaxaca, MX visiting a girlfriend.

Second year here I met my Ex, very pretty, ten years younger. If anyone started messing with her here in the US I could just shoot them, South of the Border, not so much. No interest back then in visiting touristy locales so no more trips down into Mexico. I have been to Costa Rica twice helping shepherd school groups.

Been here ever since, family ties keeping me here now. Prob’ly hit the road again if I’m able after I retire.

I feel fortunate... no reason for me to answer the question, nor question the answer.

Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Surrounded by a bunch of Mexicans.
Twenty-five yard view.

Congrats! 😎

Googling on “Eskimo Cattle Baron” didn’t yield a durned thing. This screenshot is best I could do….. 🙂

Why do I live where I do?

The answer is in three parts: George Westinghouse, Red Wine, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Part 1-- Geoge Westinghouse

D.J. O'Connor and Herbert Faber worked for George Westinghouse. At this time, the railroads needed vast amount of electrical insulators that were formed by using natural Mica. The O'Connor and Faber found that phenolic resin would work as well, and came up with the original Formica. O'Connor went to Westinghouse and explained all the the wonderful things this early plastic could do. Westinghouse didn't want to develop it, but allowed O'Connor and Faber to take the patents and go off on their own. They formed Formica in a little garage on Spring Grove Avenue in Cincinnati and eventually moved into a factory at the corner of Spring Grove and Winton.

Whitey Williams was a travelling engineering consultant working for Trundell Consulting. He'd been schlepping around the midwest at various assignments. His daughter, my mother, had been in 12 cities in her first 10 years. Williams was sent to Cincinnati in 1939 to consult with Formica. Dan O'Connor liked him and offered him a full-time job. The childless Faber liked Whitey's young daughter, and offered to adopt her. Yeah, creepy, but it was well meaning. Whitey worked for Formica until retirement in 1965, living mostly in College Hill most of that time.

Part 2 -- Red Wine
German-speaking settlers found the soil around Cincinnati to be ideal for growing grapes for Rhine wine. The topology around Cincinnati, reminded them a lot of the Rhineland. Pretty soon, word was getting back to Germany of a wonderland in the Ohio Valley. By the 1840s the majority of people living in Cincinnati, and nearby Covington were German speaking. There were vineyards all over the Ohio Valley, mostly run by Germans until some killer ice storms hit late in the 19th Century and wiped everyone out.

My family's first taste of the New World was as a Hessian mercenary that took a chance after Saratoga and went over to the other side. Serving with the Continentals, he received land in Pennsylvania after the war, and moved to the Toledo area later to take land in the Great Black Swamp. They sent word back, and a trickle of our family kept coming over.

My grandfather, Henry, had survived WWI and the aftermath. By 1923, he was seeing the way things were going. His brother had already had a run-in with the Brown Shirts. He decided to emigrate to America. His older sisters were already settled in Cincinnati, so that's where he went. He knew how to build and he quickly spun up a highly successful business as a homebuilder, By 1926, he was building houses inside Music Hall for the Cincinnati Home Show. The houses would be fully plumbed, wired and landscaped, and after the show, they would be sent to a lot at one of his developments.

Dad was born in 1926. He grew up in a building family. After service in WWII, he took up building himself and by 1956 had several houses and multi-family apartment complexes under his belt. The latest was in College Hill. He had been dating a schoolteacher at College Hill Elementary when he met her co-worker, my Mother.

Part 3--Martin Luther King Jr.

April 4, 1968, I was in front of the TV at our home in College Hill when news came of the murder of Martin Luther King Junior. At first, nothing much happened, but on April 10, riots broke out in Avondale, a nearby suburb. The National Guard was called out. I remember Dad coming home on Good Friday with two boxes of #4 Buck for his Winchester Model 12. They closed the schools for an extra week beyond the Easter Holiday.

After that, Mom and Dad accelerated their search for a house further out of town. They had been looking for as long as I could remember. The house we were living in was just 12 doors down from Grandpa Whitey's. We'd been there for as long as I could remember. That summer, we went looking for houses every which way. In December, we found a house under construction that fit our needs. The builder was the son of one of Grandpa Henry's homebuilder buddies. We moved in May of 1969. I went to school in the Greenhills School District. It was one of the best college prep districts in the area.

Epilog:
Not a whole lot changed after that. After I went off to college, Dad built a new house just down the road. When I started a family, Satan and I bought a house just up the road. Dad died a decade ago and Mom went into care. We ended up selling our house and moving into Dad's. That's the place we keep in town when we're not at the farm.

The farm is situated in Bracken County, about an hour upriver from Cincinnati. At one point, there was a sizeable German-speaking population, and there is one family running a vineyard up the road. There is goetta on the menu in the local diner. Some folks have a Kentucky accent with a bit of an abruptness attributable to their past.

I've got two places I call home. One's an old farmhouse in east central Mississippi that's family property, my family has been in the area since about 1840 and there's not many of us left. It'll be mine until I die. It's where I go to get my hunting and outdoors fix, I own everything that I can see from my house, about 220 acres around me. Nobody messes with me there, I do what I want without some HOA ninnies telling me my grass is too tall. It's cheap to live there, I can watch deer and turkeys out my windows, pee off my deck, shoot guns off my porch, it's just utter peace and quiet.

The second place I call home is a condo on the beach in the Panhandle of Florida. It's where I go when I want people, restaurants, the beach, boating, festivals, etc. It's great too, just different than my place in MS. It shares an attribute with the place in MS in that it's peaceful and nobody messes with you, everybody's friendly and happy here.

The common theme between these places, and which is absolutely required of any place I'll ever live, is limited government that doesn't stick their nose in your business every time you turn around. Also taxes, they don't tax the crap out of me in either of these places (although the Fed does a good job of taking much of my income anyway). There are only a few states that I deem livable due to taxes. Generally those are in the south but Texas, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nevada would be OK in that regard also. I was born in Maryland but don't care if I ever set foot in that cesspool ever again, the entire eastern seaboard from Long Island to the North Carolina border can fall into the ocean and we'd be better off. I love Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and upstate New York but I'd never live there due to the political climate.

I live here in Oregon because I'm too old to move! (recently turned 70

I'm a fourth generation native here and bet my Great Great Grandfather is rolling over in his grave over how this state is being ran now days.

Virgil B.

Work, waiting for kids to finish high school and then I’m out back to the NW…. But Not home state of Oregon though.
Like Virgil said. It’s a dumpster fire. Unless things change next 6 years. I ain’t going back there for good

The chicks.

could have been worse I guess, he could have decided to live in Price Hill

Whereabouts?

Wife wouldn't leave her parents and get so far away that they couldn't have ready access to the grandkids, now the kids are grown, moved off and her parents are dead an I am stuck here with nowhere to go and nothing to do where I get there.

Dead end road.
No close neighbors.
Quiet.
360 degree view for miles.
Spring water.
1,000 yard target for those shooting 50BMG rounds.

We have taken elk, bear, lion, whitetail, mule deer, and lots of yotes here on the place within a 1/4 mile of the house, plus trout from a creek by house.

I plan to croak here.......way off in the future I hope.

Because I love mosquitoes, fire ants and hurricanes.

SE Ak by choice
One of the best decisions I’ve ever made

I moved to Colorado in1974 so I could hunt elk every year.I think I have missed two seasons since then. I was just lucky enough to find a good job too and worked there until I retired in 2003.

If I wasn't so old and gimped up,I would move out of Colorado as it has become a 2nd California and I probably won't be hunting much anymore.