It's a little difficult to describe the 30's; things were a little out of focus back then, like watching
"The Grapes of Wrath" through the bottom of a coke bottle. Since colored film hadn't been invented yet, all the pictures
of my youth are in black and white, therefore, the thirties were rather colorless......I'm sure grass was still green and
tulips came in a variety of colors, but I remember everything just being black and white. Might have something to do
with the fact that I was just a baby, but it wasn't a very colorful world. Money was hard to come by and so were
jobs.....anybody working was considered lucky. Bread lines were still in vogue and there were very few fat people walking
around.
I was born on Thursday, July 15th, 1937 in Anchor Hospital in St. Paul, MN, the second son of George and
Blanche Hunt. I had an older brother, Don, who was born 21 months before me and I don't think he was too happy
to share his world with a little brother. He made his lack of sibling affection all too apparent and continued
to remind me for the next 17 years....."Hey, this is MY house....I'm just letting you live here, OK?"
I can only imagine what the addition of my three younger sisters to the family did to his psyche, but that would come
later.
To give you a better idea of what was going on at the time I was born, let me insert a few facts here.
One week prior to my birth, Emilia Ehrardt dissappeared over the Pacific and cars were allowed on the Golden Gate bridge for
the first time. Five weeks later, Robert Redford was born. Three months before I arrived, the "Hindenburg" exploded
at it's berth in Lakehurst, NJ and four years would pass before the carving on Mt. Rushmore would be completed. I wasn't
aware of it at the time, but war clouds were brewing in the skys over Europe and the entire world would be at war for the
better part of my childhood. But I was oblivious to all that....I was just happy to be here.
My father was one of the fortunate few who held a regular job, but I don't think we had much to spare, so
another mouth to feed couldn't have been the most welcome thing in the world, contributing to the fact that I was never the biggest
kid on the playground, weighing in at 117 pounds by the time I joined the service 17 years later. I don't recall
being sickly, exactly, but I sure could have used an extra few pounds for many years.
Until the time I was about two, we lived in St. Paul at a place I called "the dirty house"....I assume because
it was gray. I don't recall calling it that, but that's what my folks always told me. Then we moved to Tanner's
Lake, a suburb of St. Paul and I spent the next few years making a pest of myself, following my brother along the shoreline
on the lake right across the street from where we lived in the whitest house I'd ever seen. My earliest recollection
of life was an image of Don scooping a sunfish out of the lake from the end of a pier, using a small box that strawberry's
came in......I was in awe. I'd never catch another fish that was a bigger thrill than that minnow-like creature from
the depths of Tanner's Lake. I was about two, so it looked like a whale to me.
Roberta came along when I was three, and shortly thereafter, we packed up the old Ford and headed to
South Milwaukee, where a better job awaited my father at Bucyrus Erie. He would spend the entire war building Sherman
Tanks, and I finally got to live in a house with a bathroom.
