What You Get

After I retired from the State of Alaska, Peggy and I moved back to property that we had purchased in Izard County, Arkansas. Soon after we got there, I opened a Kodokan Judo School in Calico Rock, the nearest town to our property. I hung some small posters that I had made about things that I wanted my students to know. One of them was this:

In case you cannot read it, it is a quote from a person named Zig Ziglar and it says that “What you get when you reach your destination is not nearly as important as what you become by getting there.” While that is true when a person finally gets promoted to Shodan (First Degree Black Belt), I found that it is also true about getting a book written and published. I had to decide whether or not to include stories like “Sharp County Paper” and “Hang’em High” because the language in both was not how I choose to talk. Or how to modify them so that the story could be told without violating my conscience. Other stories like “Dad’s Ticket” or “Something to Help” were situations that challenged my integrity, but they would not be the only things that did. Still others like “One Green Bean” and “Bank Robber” were deeply personal.

So, the journey from first deciding to write this book to laying it out and finally getting it to market taught me a lot of lessons. Maybe the most important thing is discovering myself and the incidents in my life that made me who I am. What you get in this book is a peak into this life of mine and from that perhaps you can discover what things in your life make you who you are as well.