When I would go out to :Las Vegas I would get to tell him "good morning", he would make me breakfast on Saturday, and I loved to listen to him and Sheila hassle each.
  

I moved from a small town in Alabama to Los Angeles, CA when I was fairly young... I'd been 20 for less than 3 months. I was nervous, excited, and had no idea what I was in for since I was playing a lot of it by ear. Mike and Sheila kindly let me spend the night at their home while I was making the trek. While we were visiting that evening, Mike started giving advice on driving through the desert... freezing a water bottle the night before so you have cold water all day, general car care tips, etc. Then he started telling me tales of his experiences in LA Including $8 glasses of OJ as far as the eye could see, and tires melting on the highway from the heat. There were a couple of others, but those are the ones that stand out. I'd never been so far from home by myself, and was a pretty gullible person well into my 20's. I don't think it was until I'd been here for a bit that it dawned on me that he was totally messing with me and I immediately realized that he'd had a twinkle in his eye the entire time he was pulling my leg that evening. He also taught me the glory of french press coffee the following morning. It's still my favorite.

Mike turned 21 about a month before several of us had to go to ROTC Summer Camp at Ft. Sill, OKlahoma, so serious shenanigans were simply out of the question for his birthday.  This left Palo Duro Canyon and environs as the only worthy option for innocent but memorable fun.  We made it only as far as Six Gun City, a recently closed tourist “must see” (wink-wink) attraction near the park entrance.  Abandoned a few years earlier, it had been the site of many OK Corral-type gunfights and still had several buildings, corrals, hitching posts, and...an honestly ancient watering trough, somehow full, slime-covered, and absolutely foul smelling.  After walking around near the canyon rim and exploring (trespassing) the land and the old buildings, Mike made the mistake of commenting on how warm the weather was.  Well, it WAS his birthday, so..he put up a real good fight, but he was only one person, and there were four others of us, and after “rasslin’” him a bit in the dirt, we threw him completely in and under that nasty water!  Mike stood up, dripping green slime and smelling vile, and said, “Man, that was refreshing!”  With that, he went under a second time and came up grinning.  One of the guys offered a hand to help Mike out, and Mike snatched him and pulled him into the trough, too.  Lord, did they stink! We laughed and rode around a bit, and about sundown we stopped on a small bridge in Hunsley Hills, a new subdivision north of Canyon.  Mike said something like, “Well, the sun has set on my birthday, and y’all still stink!”  So we took off our shoes and all jumped in that neighborhood creek to rinse off the stench of that trough.

My father left four very detailed pages of things my mother needed to know if he went first. Last updated July 3, 2019.

The last three lines read
"Thanks for a wonderful life. It wasn't fair, but you really were the mortar that held the bricks together. I think the kids believe that, too. Take care, and I'll be waiting for you on the other side. I will always love you."