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I Charlie was born April 25, 1941 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. St. Vincent's Hospital as it existed then has become a nunnery (I think the nurses live there -- does that make it a nursery?) and the operating room, where my physician father took home movies of my birth has been converted into a solarium. Last time I was there, though, you could still see it.
My father died at 43 of nephritis in 1954. I had just turned 13. My brother Gaylerd and I were taken in by Bob Richardson, proprietor of the Lone Pine Ranch (now the Sunlit Hills of Santa Fe). Bob was an entrepreneur trying to scratch a living out of the unforgiving New Mexico soil by running a combination dude ranch and equestrian school. Gaylerd and I had been students and were qualified to work as horse wranglers, which we did. We followed the method of John Phillip Rarey, who used to train horses for Queen Victoria. The method was really easy on horses, and really pretty rough on their trainers, which was OK because Rarey's method called for the main trainer guy to hang his arms over the corral rail and shout orders to young boys at the actual working surface. Young boys are much better equipped to handle the kind of things broncos do (the word comes from the Portugese and means "white." It refers to the color of an untrained horse's eyes) to people who apply Mr. Rarey's methods to them. All in all, it was fun.
My wrangling days ended when I was sent to McCurdy School, then an Evangelical United Bretheren mission near Santa Cruz, New Mexico. At McCurdy, they taught you the Bible in some detail, and they taught you the value of work. Every student had a job, and the job rotated every few weeks. The school had a dairy, wherein we learned how to
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