| In 1988 I was placed on Disabled Retirement from the Sacramento Army
Depot. I sat at home for nine months before I received the first
payment from my insurance program the Civil Service Retirement System, CSRS. This
payment delay placed me into a super terrible financial disaster. I had
to sell everything that I owned, at only pennies on the dollar, just so
I could pay my
bills. To Make things worse I was still having the severe eating disorders and
the internal problems that put me into retirement in the first place.
As a friend once told me, "I was a basket
case." The truth is that I really felt that I wasn't going to live
much longer.
It's a good thing that I was also business owner for most of my
life. I've been partners in motorcycle shops, had a multi-level
business almost twenty years and just basically, I always had things
going.
It finally came to the point that I had to sell my house to
keep from going into foreclosure. If you are into Real Estate,
this is where the Motivated Seller comes from. I was now one of
those motivated sellers. In fact, I was so motivated that I had to
sell my house at 30,000 under market value or I would lose it by the
time the very next payment became due.
I didn't know what I was going to do or, really, where I was going to
go either. I was feeling real bad and, as I have already said, I
felt like I was going to die. The thoughts that kept going through
my mind was to drive to the eastern parts of the Mt. Shasta area and
just die in the woods and let my dog survive on his own. That's
how bad it really was.
I haven't heard from my brother, Jerry, in about ten years and here
he calls me up right when I was needing someone. He knew that I
was hurt (disabled) and that I had financial problems as a result of my
retirement mess. He said that he would buy my Cadillac and then
let me stay in his house since he was the communications officer on the
Arco Texas Oil Tanker and he had to be out to sea most of the
time, all I would have to do was deliver the car.
I brought the car across the country along with my cat Spuds and dog
Mackinzie. We did a lot of driving covering many miles in each
day. The first night we stayed on the Bonneville Salt flats
in my little tent. Mackinzie wanted to run but my cat Spuds
wouldn't leave the car. As a matter of fact she wouldn't eat or
hardly drink anything either. I thought that it was the new
environment or something. The second night we stayed near Bushnell
Nebraska at a rest area. And on the third night we drove to my
brothers house in Washington Iowa. He had to go back out to sea
for a short time so he gave me 1000 down for the car and promised to
give the remaining 4000 when he returned and I was completely moved
into his house. He made me sign a receipt that he paid only 1000
for the car, for tax purposes, or he wouldn't give me the money at all.
He also knew that if I didn't have that money or I couldn't get back
home or make my last payment on the house. This is what is called
putting me between a rock and a hard place, so I had to sign the paper.
So, he went back to sea and I brought my dog and cat to live at my
mom's house in Bushnell, Illinois. I then drove the car back to
Iowa, dropped off the car, and caught a plane back to Sacramento.
Here I made my final payment on the house and moved almost everything
that I had left into storage in Sacramento. My house finally
closed and it was time for me to move.
I left Sacramento into the mountains and drove up Hwy. 395, north of
Lake Tahoe. The scenery was absolutely fantastic. Just
before I left Sacramento, my friend, Bob, signed me us as an Energy
Release distributor and gave me an eight pack of Energy Release too.
Because of this additive, my van kept running better and better and the
longer I drove it the better it ran still. Also, the longer that I
drove, the better I noticed that I felt too.
On my first night after driving, I was sleeping at a turnoff next to
the road. In the middle of the night I heard some noise and
noticed that the van was shaking. At that time I owned a gun and I
stuck a .357 Magnum barrel into some jerks nose. He turned around
very quickly, jumped into his Camero and burned a lot of rubber getting
himself out of there as fast as he could.
On the second day of the trip, I headed farther north to Alturus
California to see my old friend and customer Bob Moore. Bob ran an
air charter service in Alturus using a Cessna P210 Centurion Aircraft
which I used to work on back when I worked at Patterson Aircraft
Company. When I got to Alturus I heard some terrible news
and found out that Bob had recently died. After asking a few
more questions, I was told not to try to contact his wife because she
was still taking it so badly that I would only make it worse.
My trip continued north until I got to Bend Oregon then headed east
toward Boise Idaho. The longer I drove, the better I felt. I
felt better because I was getting out of the high stress of the City of
Sacramento and getting out of the high allergy area as well. My
drive continued through Yellowstone National Park then to Mt. Rushmore
National Park.
During my visit to the Mt. Rushmore Visitors Center, I met a
man named Eugene Kovineg who was the Chairman of the Hall of Records
Committee. He showed me the reproduction of the true Hall of
Records that is located behind the heads on Mt. Rushmore. I had
some pretty impressive camera equipment which does a lot of speaking for
itself, but I was thinking a about what the Joe Cossman courses that
taught me, there's a product everywhere, you just have to be able to see
it. So it went through my head, "Here's a New Product, this is a
perfect story" We continued to talk and we came to the agreement
that when I returned I could go up to the real Hall of Records and
photograph it. I wrote everything into my notebook then headed on
toward my brothers house.
Along this driving adventure, there was something very interesting
that I have never noticed before. When I was in the Sacramento
area, the writing on the restroom walls was incredibly filthy. As
I drove toward Northern California, the filthy language on the walls
went away. As I drove east and got close to Iowa City, the bad
language returned again then disappeared when I drove further to
Illinois. Further along in this story you will see I finally moved
to Kentucky. The reason that I picked Kentucky was because on the
bathroom wall it said, "God Loves and Jesus Saves." |
