Richard Hammer:  

This business of leaving a profile always reminds me of an English professors' statement regarding the writing of anything that others would read, and that is that it has to pass the 'who cares' test. Actually, his language was a little more emphatic, but for the time being we will leave it at that. I graduated from East High School in February of 1959, a semester early. I had been attending the University of Wichita for one hour a day since the start of my senior year, not necessarily because I was smart but because the high school had run out of math classes that I could take. Between the high school and the university I was allowed to attend a class in analytical geometry. I went to high school in the morning and then left for the U in the afternoon, after which I headed on downtown to go to work at the library. Shortly after the beginning of the second semester, for reasons that go beyond the scope of this discourse, I quit high school because I had enough credits to do so and still graduate. I continued going to the U and working at the library downtown. I entered the U full time in the fall of 1959, but left Wichita for San Diego in February of 1960 with the objective in mind of going to sea, the lifelong dream of someone who had never even seen the ocean until 1960. Anyway, I ended up working as a gardener for a yacht club before I finally started getting jobs doing yacht deliveries. I was 17 at the time, willing to work for nothing except food and a bunk. I found that there are a lotta people out there with boats that don't know a damn thing about them other than they float. I ended up later that year in Nova Scotia where two acquaintances had purchased a schooner built in Newfoundland and planned to take to Galveston. They were, by the way, two such individuals mentioned above. When we finally left North Sydney around the middle of November, I (and the friend with whom I had originally gone to San Diego) discovered that the erstwhile skipper of this boat had not the least concept of navigation. Suffice it to say that after a week and a half of heading in a more or less southwesterly direction we finally started heading for the 'W' on the compass, trusting that our geography lessons in school were good enough to ensure that somewhere ahead of that 'W' there was land. We ended up in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, courtesy of the USCG for the last 20 miles or so. At that point, Don and I left the boat, fully believing that because there was only 90 miles between Florida and Cuba, our erstwhile employers would not be able to find the hole. We ended up back in Wichita where I worked and went to night school for a semester. I went back to California the following summer, and other than coming back to Wichita via freight train in 1962 to visit for two weeks, I have never been back. During the intervening years between returning to California for the third time and 1966 when I caught my first ship for Viet Nam, I worked as a machinist, draftsman, truck driver and for the Army Corps of Engineers aboard a couple of hydrographic survey boats. Oh, and I met my future wife and we had the first of 6 kids. I continued to sail to the Far East, visiting almost every port that would accommodate a ship from Yokohama to Jakarta to Karachi. I quit sailing in 1970 because I got tired of my kids not having the least idea of who I was every time I got back from sea. There were three by then, all of whom were born while I was somewhere else. During the next 20 years we ended up living off the grid (literally, no power at all, and for several years in the early 70's we lived on a 200 acre farm where our closest neighbor was 4 miles away). We raised cattle, horses, pigs, chickens and kids, (the next two were born at home; I think it was my wife'...Expand for more