Richard Doty:  

uff and puff a bit. After my freshman year I went back to Merced, sold ice cream from one of those noisy trucks earning money that helped me leave that August on a 2 1/3 year visit to Uruguay and Argentina doing public communications contacting for my church. Great growing time. Survived droughts, floods, volcanic dust from a Chilean volcano, enjoyed the people. I visited capital cities also of four other Hispanic countries. In Lima, Peru I was looking for the Palace of the Inquisition of olden times. However I cut that search short when upon my calling through the gate of a magnificent palace-like place to inquire, solders from the army that had just three days before overthrown the government...I had been travelling and hadn'tt read or heard the news...poked machineguns...deadly looking things, through the gate and demanded "Quien va?" and "Manos arriba!" I put my hands up on my head, shrugged the best I could, saying "Soy turista no mas. "I'm only a tourist, I'm only a tourist looking for the Palace of the Inquisition." An officer shouted to get out of there and pointed down the street...turns out I had found the newly ex-presidential palace instead. I quickly took off and headed back to the refuge in the hotel...the heck with finding the Palace of the Inquisition! A couple of days later I found that Guatemala was also having anxiety when we were herded off the plane in Guatemala City to the airport waiting area past their solders also armed with machine guns. That folks was November 1968. I arrived back a few days later in the USA in Houston and kissed the ground, no kidding! great to be back. My folks had left Merced for Houston the day after I had left Merced for Uruguay. Houston was big, lots of freeway traffic, and new. I packed up and drove hands on the steering wheel until my shoulders ached, and then ached some more up to Provo, Utah back to BYU after Christmas. The next four years I travelled back and forth,graduating with a double major in Sociology and Spanish. Returned to BYU as a professional student going after a Masters in Sociology. I also enjoyed being with the International Folk Dance team my last semester there...what a workout! I left BYU and graduate Sociology classes moving into Public Relations up to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City (SLC) to get the Masters. I got room and board for being around to help an 88 year old woman fix meals, and shop ...tremendous experience, daughter of a Russian Jewish immigrant... Liked to eat a piece of cheese and drink her coffee out of a saucer. She also used to say, "What one forgets, one's feet have to remember." She just had to tell me that after I walked a mile to campus and a mile back to the house to get something I left at the house! The bad part about it, I really thought about that statement as I walked back to campus! I actually went to SLC in 1974 to continue to date a great girl and found another. I ended up staying in SLC where my first "real" job was in Personnel, Safety, and Public Relations doing Government Relations with OSHA, MSHA, Air Quality,the DOT and other compliance agencies. Later, one day after starting at a new company, the owner told me that chemical workers were the healthiest in the nation. I thought, "Yeah, uh huh, sure!" After the first year there I went the next 14 years without a cold, or a sore throat. Honest! Must have been all the chlorine, sulfur dioxide and ammonia I inhaled. (Do you know "they" around the turn of the century, the last one, used to sell sniffs of chlorine as a way to stay healthy?) In Utah I've tried snow tubing, skiing, fishing for deep lake trout, fishing for non-deep lake fish, watching deer, seeing a mountain lion, climbing a mountain with scouts, sleeping out in the cold of winter snow wondering if I were going to wake up dead and frozen...scout Winter Klondikes, a coming of age or toughening up thing here relating back to pioneers trecking to the west. Saw a B52 bomber crash near where I worked and broke my slow mile and a half record running though fields to reach one of the parachuting pilots. Got to him...he pointed to the smoke several miles away and asked. "Was that my plane?" When I answered yes, he groaned. For getting to the pilot first, I made the news, got on TV...even got my picture in the paper. The caption read: "Richard Doty out standing in the field" Outstanding...Impressive! For Winter Olympics 2002 I was the risk manager for the Park City Mountain Resort Venue. America took Gold, Silver and Bronze medals in Snow Boarding there! Mingled with folks from all over, Brazilian students who handled the trash, DEA agents fresh from super speed boats in the Caribbean, spoke French (little bit only) to a French Ambassador, and saw a downhill skier ram into a crowd of volunteer workers at about 75 miles an hour...only one minor elbow injury on that one. The last ten years I was a volunteer counselor in the main state prison trying to help inmates prepare to re-enter "normal" society. What an eye opener! Do you know that one can go to prison for seemingly minor things? Has made me much more aware of what we consider "wrong" enough to take us away from our lives for who knows what amount of time. A Merced classmate asked me awhile ago if I remember the Merced High School Hootenanny. I certainly do! It was one of the highlighted memories I have. Lots of fun that night. I went to the dentist the other day to repair a tooth that had lasted a long time after that day I was on that contraption that the Merced High PE Department brought in for the guys to climb up, grab hold of the metal rods each with a knob on the lower end and try to swing from one knob to the other above the ground. Well I managed to smack myself in the mouth one day with one the knobs that left a minor small crack in a tooth. Funny how I thought back to that day several months ago I was getting that tooth repaired a near century later in Salt Lake City. Funny also, how some memories are like travelling through the clouds in the higher elevations around Yosemite, can almost see beyond the road, but not quite. Others come into focus immediately or soon thereafter. I find the hardest reality about visiting the past is that once my mind gets me to the past I am suddenly there: The sights and sounds of those events become again real and somewhat solid in my mind. Those special times with those that I knew, and those that shared those times are real again for a moment and then I have to leave them. The exciting part is it's great getting to know them for real in their changed settings and know that they shared those events with me, helping to make me what I am. That remembering becomes...an adventure of the present ... and the present is great!