For anyone who knows anything about the experience of being the youngest kid in a single parent family of five or more, you also know something about what it means to be tough.

I do. Yep. Sure do. It seems like I was always scrapping for one thing or hollering about being picked on for something else. And to make matters a little different for me, I was the youngest in a family where my Father had once been a highly thought of prize fighter in the community.

Man, I couldn’t begin to tell you about the many exciting stories

I’d heard about him when I was a child. I mean, about how he’d been able to hit a man up side the head and then turn right around and put his foot in the very same place!

Oh, but of course, he would never talk about any of this stuff himself.

In fact, he very seldom was around when the stories were being told. It was always somebody else who was doing the telling, a neighbor usually or some old stranger just passing through our small community in Lincoln Heights, North Carolina. How they’d heard about him was a mystery to me. But then again, I suppose most of those things happened way before I was born.

But anyhow, I suppose it’s one of those things that will never change in life. I mean, the children are always looked upon as being mere reflections of the parents. And to that extent, my older brother and I had been saddled with the reputation of being pretty good with our hands even before we knew the meaning of the word. Simply based on what our Father had been or done in the past.

Now, I have no way of knowing for certain, but evidently my older brother had taken it upon himself to carry on the ah, legacy of what our

Dad had been or done in his younger days. Yep. And I say that because none of the older boys in the small, close country town where we lived would dare to mess with him. He was always punching or kicking something and acting crazy. So, everybody kind of left him alone, if you know what I mean.

But, people are going to be people, regardless of where they live.

And just like everyone else, we had our own little squabbles as kids.