for dependent offspring sometime in the near future. Never mind that he was holding down a full-time position as well as two part-time jobs so I could continue school. Never mind that his parents were happily raising his younger siblings without any help, interference, or the over-whelming urge to lend us their hard-earned money.

             He needed the land and he had none of his own. He needed backing and he had none of his own. And when my husband sets his mind on anything you might as well just stand aside and let him roll over you because it’s going to happen.

            So in 1957, the year I graduated high school and went into the baby business, his dad refused the loan request but instead offered to go into business with his eldest son on a handshake and an agreement for a 50-50 split in profits.

            Then began the process of piling dead cars into the pasture behind his parent’s home.

            It worked pretty well for the first few years, Dad kicking in all the cash and Ben doing most of the thinking and the heavy work. Over time he actually accumulated somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred wrecked vehicles. His folks ran a little community store named Easyville which they built when Ben was a child and it made a handy spot to sell the occasional good used car.

            But in 1965 my husband decided he had to have his own spot. The pasture land at hand wasn’t wide enough or wild enough to satisfy. So we went looking. And we looked. And we looked. For three years we looked.

            No one can know the agonies I suffered as we searched for just the right place. Houses meant absolutely nothing to him. We looked at places with falling in beams, peeling wallpaper, unheated living areas, minuscule and near-non-existent bathrooms. Tiny yards, no trees, brush-covered rock piles. If there was acreage and a couple of outbuildings it suited him. My lovely new home was lost in the shuffle of the game and he never once looked back.

            At last we settled on forty acres and a shabby old farmhouse in the middle of a jungle of buckbrush, walnut trees, and Johnson grass. There were rocks everywhere and the grasses were chest high. The fences were falling down and no crops had been planted for twenty years. But it was land. Our own land.

            About this time a new turn of events developed. Easyville was built just next to a good sized wet-weather ditch. One fine spring day there came a gully-washer. Not just a gully-washer, but a gully-gusher. A toad strangler. Water rolled down from higher ground and drowned everything it encountered, eventually raising to chest-height in my in-laws living room. To add insult to injury the water also took away the six good used cars resting in the lot next to the store.

            There went most of the potential income for that enterprise. So, in a desperate attempt to try and recoup their losses, Ben began the process of crushing the junked cars in the back pasture.

            Eventually, retirement reared its attractive head and Dad turned over his part of the business to us (that is, ceasing to invest what was left of his available cash), leaving his son to shoulder the burden for himself.

            Ben was, at last, the proud owner of his own salvage yard.