Dad and Uncle Jack went to Madison Square Garden. They met the legendary Gene Autry, and character actor Slim Pickens, who had yet to begin his movie career, was one of the rodeo clowns. (These days, these brave souls are called bullfighters.) Uncle...
After the War, but before I was born in 1949, my still-single dad, Skip Lael, was a rodeo cowboy, a bull-rider, to be exact. He and my Uncle Jack Lael, who was a champion bronc rider, were headed back East, probably driving an old truck held together by spit...
I could be accused of loving the limelight—right from the very beginning. You see, I was born a few years after the Second World War, on June 10, 1949, to Grady “Skip” Lael, age 23, and Hazel Bleecker Lael, age 20, in Spokane, Washington. Although he’d...
