I call him a genius!!!!!!!!
These are pictures of my father Levi Gilbert Rockhold in the early years of his life.
My father, while teaching me to drive a car, told me he was born into the poorest family in the poorest community. I’ve decided that how poor someone is must be relative to who is making that statement. Those pictures do not look like the poorest to me.
My father started borrowing money from the Mt Victory bank, through the bank president Henry Dickerson, at the tender age of nineteen.
As often happened, I had taken my mother and five year old daughter Pamela Dawn to Marion Ohio, a twenty mile drive from my farm home, to go shopping.
It was just before Mother’s Day. While I went to another store down the street I left Pamela with my mother. In the meantime as they are looking around Pamela finds a present and gets $5 from my mother to purchase it to give to me for Mother’s Day.
All the way home she is basking in the joy of having a secret gift to give me. On returning home she hangs on tight to that present that is in what looks like a large shoe box. But I know it is not shoes.
Then the school bus drives up to a stop and out come her sisters, Susie, who goes directly to her room, like most teenagers, and her sister Meredythe happily bouncing in the door. Holding her boxed gift, Pamela rushes over to meet her, takes the lid off the box and they both peek in. One good look at the contents, they each raise their head and laugh.
Well………..whatever it is in that box……..it’s funny.
My Real Estate associate and friend Muriel West, each year for our office Christmas party brought a double batch of these delicious baked beans and there would be only a small serving of them left over that I would beg her to let me take home with me to enjoy later!!!!
A portrait of my granddaughter Sarah Christina Drake I painted in 2014.
Did you know that in France you can get a pilots license to fly an airplane when you are sixteen years old but for a license to drive a car you have to be eighteen years old? Of course that makes sense when you realize France is the world’s top builder of aircraft.
So at age seventeen this French exchange student attending Salem High School had a pilots license but no drivers license.
My granddaughter Sarah Drake a Salem High senior was a life guard evenings at the Salem community center and through the year some times gave this French student a ride back to the home of the American family with whom he was living. Then came the PROM. And he ask her for that date. I present to you my beautiful granddaughter Sarah Christina Drake and her handsome French connection Paul Robin.