Today would be my Dad's 100th birthday. Everybody thought it was last year but I know he lied to get in the Coast Guard in WWII. Lets just say homebirth birth certificates were easy to manipulate.
He served on a sub chaser out of Norfolk and they had 1 probable sinking of a German sub. He got transferred to the Pacific theater assigned to an LST and was Coxswain of a Higgins boat at Iwo Jima. After the war he married my Mom and lived in California for a while working as a Line Crew chief for SoCal Edison. In the late 50's they moved back to Archer City where Dad owned the Texaco station on the corner of the square for a few years. It's in The Last Picture Show. He sold that, moved back home to Chico and went into trucking for the next 20 years. In the early 80's built a small bar/bbq joint in that did decent business for a few years before he retired.
Of course while all this is going on there was the ranch to run, cattle to mess with, all the day to day stuff. He smoked 2 packs of Camels and drank a fifth of WL Weller every day. They weren't all good times, they weren't all bad times. He was a force of nature, bigger than life and I swear Mike Judge used him as inspiration for Cotton Hill.