Growing Up in North Dakota

After Hamilton, my family moved to Bowbells where I attended the 5th and 6th grade. As I mentioned earlier, Bowbells was a big town in contrast to the other places we lived in North Dakota, having probably 500–600 people live there. My mom and dad liked this town a lot, and had thought that we might actually “settle” there, but my dad unfortunately was asked to leave the job. He had unified several country districts into one so that the children from the country came into town to school. This caused a lot of political upheaval in the community and, as a result, my dad lost his job. The summer after 6th grade, our family

took a trip to California to see what it might be like to live here. We visited my dad’s family in both Los Angeles (Ann and Dick and Gerald and Agnes) and Sunnyvale (Ruth and Royce) – they decided that after serving out the term of a job he’d accepted for my 7th grade year, that we’d head off for Northern California to begin a new, more stable life.

Anyway, because of its size, Bowbells had many things that the other towns we lived in didn’t. There was a Dairy Queen (your dad and I visited it after we were married – it wasn’t the bright shiny building I’d remembered – and it