And as much as I’d like to remember symbolically picking up this piece of wood as a two-year-old in 1955, my earliest authentic memory as a child was kindergarten at Jefferson Municipal Grade School, tucked away in a cozy blue collar neighborhood, a middle-class community where most folks struggled to make ends meet.

My first day of kindergarten was also my older sister Catherine’s first day as a Journalism student at UND. I missed her desperately, as she certainly wouldn’t have allowed me to wear a Bat Masterson outfit to school for the first month. I guess I thought it was cool . . . even though my older brother Paul wouldn’t properly admit we were in any way related.

Evenings and weekends were spent canvassing my parents' 50-by-150 plot of land that our house was centered on, and what I could possibly do with it (with my parents' permission, of course). I started to dream big, as this was how my brain worked. I was a dreamer. And it didn’t take me long to realize that the educational curriculum I desired was not necessarily available to me, because whatever I was reading in class was not being absorbed and/or registering in my head.

To this day . . . at the age of 67, I have yet to read a book. Am I embarrassed? Certainly not. But how does one survive in a world full of knowledge without having read a book?

Did I mention that I was a dreamer? Oh yeah . . . two or three times.