Now for my Dad. He was born somewhere in the White Birch forests of Minnesota. His father died when he was eight, so the details I know are light, but I do know he was a man of personal will and determination. He had lost one of his legs and refused any help offered to him that was due to it. He believed you learned to use what you have, and be gracious to have it. My dad, would tell me stories of hunting with him as a child. How he would move through the woods and across the streams like a deer, all while carrying his rifle, lunch, and my father on his shoulders. I wish I could have spent one season on the woods with that man. My Dad's mother was a short little woman, the homemaking type. Soft spoken and always baking. She however could be mean as a badger when provoked. She remarried to my grandfather some time after my dad's father died, a burley coal miner. Barrel chested and hams for hands. He adopted my Dad and his sister, changing the name Richards to Pounds. PA became home.

I am the planned bastard son of two people, my Mom and Dad of course. My mother was a middle child of 4. Of her siblings two are deaf and dumb (can't hear or speak), her older brother and herself though we're as perfectly normal as any others at the time. Born in a small town in western Pennsylvania, her father, a navy veteran, golden gloves boxer, and submariner. Her mother, had chosen to work rather than be a housewife, she was a switch operator for the local Bell telephone company, along with other professions along the way, but I can't recall the others. My mother, and her oldest brother, not having any issues with communication, would be tasked with looking over the other two, and would be the "go to" children when tasks needed done. Physical work tasked to the oldest brother, and housework tasked to my mother. That's just how it was back then, and now the sculpting it had on the personalities of each of them are easily recognized. That's my Mom's origins.