Episode 1 : UK to MO

The speaker, AlaskaDub, shares their origin story, starting from their birth on an Air Force base in England. They talk about their parents' backgrounds and their travels before settling in southwest Missouri. They recall their childhood memories in Denver and Tucson, their experiences at school, getting involved with the wrong crowd, and their interest in sports and academics. The speaker mentions their partying lifestyle and reflects on their past choices. Welcome to the first AlaskaDub podcast. I'm your host, AlaskaDub, also known as Jay. So thank you for joining me. Hopefully this will be a new addition to my YouTube site. So hopefully you will check things out today. But this isn't an ad, this is a podcast. So you came here for the AlaskaDub. This is the origin story. I figured I'd start with just to get something down first recorded. I don't know how long this is going to last, this actual pod. So in the pre-AlaskaDub story, well, it goes all the way back to an Air Force base about 50 miles outside of London. That's where I was born, April 11, 1967. At the same time, Jimi Hendrix A. Joe's first single got released. We were both released around the same time. I actually had been in England less than nine months. My mom was pregnant, got pregnant over in France. My dad was stationed in France in a little place called Evinru, I believe. And he didn't believe her when she said that she had morning sickness or whatever, when they were taking the ferry across the Channel. So I started with disbelief from the very first. Anyhow, Lake and Heath Air Force Base was the installation that my dad was stationed at. He joined the Army Air Corps when he was a teenager, was part of the Berlin Airlift. He wasn't in the Air Force yet, but that allowed him to get out of the coal-mine country of Kentucky, which definitely added years to his life. Most of his siblings passed away pretty young. He was a demon on the banjo. The story was that he was on the radio at the age of nine in Kentucky playing banjo. By the time I came along, he also played guitar and fiddle. So he was quite a musician and also a collector. I think that's where the hoarding of precious things came into my DNA. My mom, she was born in Texas, like some other wonderful women in my life. She had sort of the Grapes of Wrath thing, where during the Depression, they moved to California, and ended up being farmers in California. I'll just say almonds and apricots. What's funny is, I visited each of my parents' homes once when I was a kid. A solo trip to Kentucky with my dad, and a family trip to California, where I got left in the desert accidentally at 4 a.m. at a gas station. I went to go use the bathroom, and my dad was still asleep. He forgot that I'd walked past him getting out. They get back in the car and drive off, and by the time it's time for a little early morning snack, they shake the bundle of blankets in the back seat that they think is me and realize I need to turn around. That was a young adventure, that's for sure. I'm going to the police station, and donuts, and a cat. Kentucky was just crazy. Anyhow, so both of my parents were of rural backgrounds, and just Depression-era upbringings. For the most part, very frugal, and unwasteful in most regards. A lot of my young foolishness, I'm sure, was pretty shocking. That's a quick background on my folks. Very, very quick, to the point that I left out everything, basically. They're both the oldest of large families, six and seven siblings. Mom had six, not the oldest of six, dad oldest of seven. So they both have that extra responsibility thing going on. But when they met, he was the handsome young airman, and she was in nursing school, and fell in love, and they bolted. They started traveling the world together, and all sorts of crazy things. My sister came along ten years before me. I think my sister might have to be a heroin addict, so. So, folks got together, had kids, traveled, and I was at the end of his military career, before I turned two. Went to get stationed back in the States, in Denver. So, we were there for a couple years. Great memories of the mountains, and the lakes, and I'm sure that also super put the nature bug in me. And then he was stationed in Tucson, or in that area. So, lived there for, I think, about a year, maybe two. And then we returned to Denver, and that's really when my very many memories started. I have a little of the Colorado ones, of course, all sort of mushed together. And I have some of the desert, when we lived in Tucson. I remember the beautiful colors of the sunset, and the crazy animals. I'm singeing my leg on the tailpipe of a dirt bike I was riding on the back of, my dad. So, I started school in a little house, 730 South Josephine Street. That house is super trilled in my head, remembering it so long now. And I used to walk to school, about ten blocks. I hear now, I wouldn't walk five blocks. I was an adult with a sidearm. So, hopefully that's a report of an old time, and it's kind of come back around. It's definitely a place I would like to visit on the journey back down south, whenever that occurs. But after school, I was a water bug. So, there was a large park, George Washington Park. It was George Washington and everything around that area. George Washington Park had a rec center, as well as a pool. So, I was swimming all the time. And I think I remember, the family had one car. Dad would catch the bus downtown. Making dentures, like the technician side of it, I believe. And his buddies would drop him off there at the park. And we'd all, you know, drive home from there. And, you know, it was the early 70s. So, a lot of weird things. About my last memory, I think it would have been first grade. At the end of my first grade. Went from, you know, my second year of the situation I just described. It was in the stressful, racial, well, everything's still stressful, racial, but it was defagregation, integration, kind of thing. And so, basically, for second grade, I would be riding a bus one hour each way to the school that they'd let us tour. And we were about, it would have been somewhat fair, tables turned, to be like the only white kids in an all-black school. And as open and non-prejudiced as my family is, even if I was going to go to a, regardless of what school, was at the end of a one-hour bus ride each way. That wasn't going to work. So, that coincided with my dad's retirement from the Air Force. And so, my folks wanted to get back to their rural roots. Somehow they chose southwest Missouri, the Missouri Ozarks, a little bit north of the town of Springfield, the city of Springfield, it's like the third largest city in Missouri. I rented a house for about six months over the summer. And then I started my second grade at Pleasant Hope Elementary School. Kind of a town, 360-some people, just a crossroads with a market and a food store and built some schools and four or five churches. But that was further north. So, we were literally, literally on the school district border, where it bordered against the northern most school district of Springfield. Their bus turned around in the dirt road that was our southern property. In fact, the road less traveled kind of thing, that made all the difference in a lot of respects. Going to a tiny-ass country school versus the big city school. Just the range of exposure to experiences and opportunities and people would have been so much different. But, you know, all throughout school I had been at Pleasant Hope. I did have friends, you know, not always a huge amount. I kind of basically got along with everybody, more or less. And, you know, I had one or two pals that I hung out with. And then, you know, at high school and everything along, I did well academically. Actually, almost part of the recognition of the different levels of school was the fact that kindergarten and first grade in Denver, And as well as being a reader, an avid reader, my entire conscious life, I can never, like memories and books arrive at the same time in my head. I was probably gnawing on books before I could even comprehend them. So, those combined pretty much allowed me to coast for the first two years. I started learning new stuff about fourth grade. And I was also tall for a kid. So, being sort of the weird outsider, brainiac, tall kid. But it had a way of singling me out, at least I thought. And if you see class photos, those are in my head. And that's all before the 11-inch growth spurt that I had between sixth and eighth grade. Ended up being 6'4", shrunk, slightly settled to 6'3". But so, basically the same size, height, since 13, since age 13. So, 40 years, giant thing. I'm digressing. I don't know, I did 20 minutes and I'm not out of high school. So, I'm not out of high school. You know, I got to falling in with the wrong crowd, like I had mentioned before. I'm hoping my chair doesn't squeak too much. I forget that I'm striving for the audio quality. So, apologizing to my future self, I guess, for hearing this. I might be the only one. So, you know, I got involved with drinking and drugs when I was way too young. And it led to no good and irresponsible behavior. So, that's sort of an undercurrent for any of the upcoming stuff until, I don't know, a year and a half later. Until I married my wife. I'm sorry to get all super reflective. So, it was a weird combination. My 8th grade was my big sports trial. I tried swimming at the YMCA, but it involved like that 15-mile drive each way to do it once a week. Between the drive and the fact that little kids were a speedo, because we were like a real swim team. Not some creepy old dude, a college dude. But, it was a weird combination. Little kids were a speedo, because we were like a real swim team. Not some creepy old dude, a college dude. Joe. A college Joe. So, I was too uncoordinated to perform well in baseball or basketball. I didn't know my height. I didn't know my height. These arms. The coach was just disgusted. Disgusted at the waist. The ring span. The height. There was a couple guys that were as tall as I was for the longest time, and then they both caught up and got a little taller than me. Thankfully, I wasn't the tallest and being a poor performer. So, that was like the one year of trying to be a jock. And, from then on, there was this weird combination of super scholastic and math and English. At the same time, just partying my ass off. At one point, I was like, I want to get it all out of my system by the time I'm 16, because I've been saving money and working, hauling hay in the summer. Going in on Saturdays with my dad to where he was working, he ended up getting a job from the Air Force. I get this job loyalty thing from him, like in the Air Force for 30 years, and then he joins this, it's called Quinn Coffee Company in downtown Springfield, Missouri. Springfield's like the old downtown Springfield, sort of like Rome built on a bunch of hills. Close to the very heart of downtown was some railroad tracks coming in, and that is four or five story. That's the coffee company place. So, being a big kid, I started from hauling the tarantula infested bags of coffee beans that they'd take on a probably non-OSHA approved, ancient elevator to the top. Of this building, where they had the grinder, and, uh, no. Please forgive me, it has been a long, it's been 40, 40 plus years. Like I said, at the top, you'd have to, like, unbag the stuff and prep it for the roaster. But, as it got processed, it would, like, go down chutes to the next floor to the next step. So, you'd have the work of curing, maybe, first cure, then roast, and then grind, and then drop it down into bags, and then they supplied coffee. It smelled so good, I remember certain phases just made the whole, like, for blocks, just smell like coffee. And, uh, when they weren't doing that, there was a bakery about two blocks away, and, so, it doesn't, the downtown Springfield smelled pretty good at that time. But, from being a little kid, helping out, you know, they, Quinn Coffee, ended up being bought by a subsidiary of Hershey. So, by the time my dad retired, he went from just being a, you know, like the warehouse, the warehouse guy that he got hired to be, to, uh, being the, like, quality control manager of the spice, the spice division of, uh, Mr. Hershey's place. Every day, every day his clothes would smell like whatever spices they were processing. He'd have a cinnamon day, or a nutmeg day, and, so, it was, it ended up being, we found out later, a fantastic cover for being a supposedly non-cigarette smoker. When he married my mom, she's, like, no cigarettes, no drinking, she's, like, not a pastor's daughter, but super straight. And, uh, I think the only time she got messed up was a friend, oddly enough, a friend of mine saw her in the, like, recovery lounge of the dentist. Um, I'll, um, as she was, after she had some dental things done, and she was having to sober up from the nitrous oxide, and, um, he said it was pretty hilarious. But, never, like, no drink, drinking, smoking, any of that. She tried chewing tobacco when, uh, that was a thing back in that area, and I just started to do it, I wanted to do it, and, uh, she's, like, well, let's all do it. Well, if you're going to do it, let's all do it. And, so, we all pretty much turned, well, my dad, you know, Kentucky Hillbilly, he had some chops, but, yeah, me and mom just turned green, and, you know, it was a great learning experience for all of us. Um, alright, so, um, I'm about a half hour in, and I'm just about to wrap up the high school years. Um, doing well scholastically, partying way too much, and, uh, about the time I get my first car, a 1970 Chevelle Mount. Alright, that's where we will pick up next time, folks. So, part two of Three Alaska Jokes coming up soon. Talk to you soon.