In some ways, I have always been a wanderer. It has been said that my father and mother had just completed a 400 mile sales trip — my dad was a sales representative — right before I was born. And I have to admit that I have always enjoyed traveling and meeting new people. It continued on when my three cousins — Paul, Alan and TX — and my younger brother Tim took a pontoon raft from St. Louis to New Orleans back in the late 1960s. We saw a slice of America that few people saw, from the segregated South to the wild streets of New Orleans where it was said that the Bible-thumping Southerners would go to sin on the weekend and beg forgiveness on Sunday.

And then there was the hitchhiking across America during the early 1970s. What got me started was my brother Chris putting me and five friends on a freight car in Milwaukee — he worked the rail yard for the Milwaukee Road — and we rode the rail to Seattle, Washington before hitchhiking to San Francisco. Due to my earlier work picketing for the United Farm Workers, we got invited to witness the opening of the first UFW health clinic in the Salinas Valley. I was always fortunate to meet people where one door led to another and that is the story of my life.