Roger E. Carrier
AUTHOR

Roger E. Carrier

Literature & Fiction
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My best friend Dean and I were two of the poorest kids at Salt Lake City's Riverside Elementary (torn down). Dean had ten brothers and sisters and two of his teenage brothers slept in a former coal shed. Dean later owned a private club in Salt Lake City with his brother. A year before he died, Dean spoke of our poverty. "There was no place to go but up." Ha! I was the only boy in our crowd who went to college. Most of my friends wound up working at Kennecott Copper, and a couple paid dearly for it. Dean was drafted and went to Vietnam, but I was admitted to the University of Utah and learned how to talk like the man on the six o'clock news, as Don Williams sings in "Good Ole Boys Like Me." During the 1950s, my father, an unemployed former wrestling champion, took our family on extended summer vacations. My mother and father figured we could live as cheaply on the road as at home (my mother cooked on a Coleman stove and we slept outside on aluminum cots. As a boy watching the stars in the Nevada desert, I dreamed of seeing a flying saucer while my parents talked about the importance of helping to make a better world. Our trips were long. For example, in July of 1958, we traveled like gypsies with a homemade rowboat on top on our old Kaiser. Our wanderings lasted 27 days over 3700 miles, using three gallons of oil(!). Later, after we graduated from the University of Utah, my wife and I worked two years to save money for a world trip. We quit our teaching jobs and set out for 368 days, traveling on five continents. We took the bus from Salt Lake City to Buenos Aires! It took three months. We did similar journeys in Africa and India, sleeping in rundown hotels or in rooms above bars with a bathroom down the hall.
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