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Show 18 but in a special way, and Tarzan was a character in a novel to me before I saw him on the screen, but I had never listened to a radio before and those voices from that magic box convinced me absolutely. They spoke directly to my heart and I thought they were telling me to be a pilot-adventurer too. It didn't occur to me for twenty years that they might have been telling me to be an actor. First though I was going to be a cowboy like Granddad Brocken. He was my only grandparent alive. Women who birthed large families tended to die before their men, and my other grandfather, a morose Irishman named Jerry Regan, had such a constitutional weakness that he went even before his wife. I know Jerry through family stories, how he farmed and kept a large herd of dairy cows which he hated to milk, especially one of them which gave so much milk that she had to be drained four times a day, morning, noon, evening and midnight. Her full udder practically dragged the ground, and in a good mood Jerry talked about putting it on wheels. But he detested that cow. He couldn't go out to the barn to face any of them in the morning unless he'd had a drink first, and of course he had to have more fortification before he went back to face that supercow at noon, and he was flying medium-high by the time he pulled on that fabulous udder in the evening, but what actually did him in was the midnight session. Pretty soon his whiskey was costing him more than he got for the milk of the cows, and assaulting his spleen as well, which gave out and left him dead. At two years old, I was unconcerned. His wife though, Grandmother Regan, was so grief stricken, or maybe just tired, that she followed him. So I had one grandparent, Granddad Brocken, who had been a true cowboy, that is, a kid who left home and drifted around the West, a bum on horseback who first rode into the Uncompahgre Valley before the town was founded and |