I’ve been scanning more slides into the computer. Some of these are quite interesting! One of them
was taken when we stopped by Mt. Rushmore sometime around August, 1972. We had been in Idaho visiting my family and were in our Volkswagen camper. On the way back we drove through Yellowstone and camped in a national forest campground where a huge thunderstorm raged for several hours in the middle of the night. All the kids slept through the storm — that’s how tired everyone was. We pulled into a campground near Mt. Rushmore the next night where it was very cold and raining. We were literally freezing in our little camper. A pickup truck pulling an Airstream trailer pulled in next to us, was set up within minutes, and they were cooking fried chicken within a half hour of arriving. We had a bit of envy that night.

The next morning we drove up to Mt. Rushmore. It was very cloudy and dark, but when we arrived the clouds parted for about a half hour during which time this picture was taken. You probably also need to know that the sweater I’m wearing is still hanging in my closet. It was a high school graduation gift from my parents.

The only other news is that my sister-in-law Christine is in the hospital in Salt Lake City with some pretty serious problems. Things are beginning to get better, however. She had a couple of heart attacks and threw off some blood clots which lodged in her legs cutting off circulation. She has diabetes which further complicated the situation. The medical staff has been able to break up and dissolve the clots and blood is now flowing properly in the legs. Tomorrow they’ll do a heart catheterization to determine what they can do about the heart attack. We’re quite concerned and hopefully things will continue to improve.

The picture shows Jim in the tiger-colored sweater, Dawnmarie, Heather, and me holding Trevor who would have been about 11 months old.