wanted some of the things that we did for our children

and our wives and ourselves.

Was explained by the fact that we were products of

what is called the depression. Sadly, they say

many young people today don't even know what that term means.

It means that everybody was poor.

Statistically almost everybody was poor for about 10 years.

Starting with the stock market crush and got worse after that.

And when you're really poor for a long time

you're a very different human being

than when you're middle class or rich.

At one point,

if they got only one point.

I ran away from home. I was 16 at the time.

I bummed around the country for a few weeks.

And I literally faced severe hunger.

I had seven dollars, they lasted exactly seven days.

After that, no money

and pretty quickly that converts into no food.

If you knew where there was a soup kitchen,

I guess you could go there, but

I didn't know about that, I was on the road

I didn't know where I was much less where other things were.

I would beg. Very quickly, you turn into a beggar.

You might think you would never do that, but you're wrong.

All you have to do is get hungry enough and you

beg your brains out.

It's the conventional dialogue that you saw on movies.

Hey Mark can you spare a dime or you know,

you got a quarter you're not using? I could use it.

And by large, you get ignored or you get contempt.

The only people who ever treated me cool,

not the only people, but almost

the only people who ever treated me kindly

were the Mexican Americans

I ran into in the South Western states.

One guy I remembered opened his own pockets

showed me they were empty and he shrugged.

I like that we had a nice moment together

because he was saying, I'm no better off than you are.

Another man said, wait Sinor and he went into a little

hovel railey and came out with a tortilla full of beans.

I loved him for that.

And there was a nice attitude

when I asked a Mexican

if he had anything that I could eat or

money to buy it with or whatever.

My fellow Anglos by a large treated me coldly and rudely.

I ate garbage at one point.

You will do that too and you'll thank the universe for the garbage.

Boy what a thrill, here I found a can with some beans in it.

I scooped out the ants,

blew them away

and then I ate the nine or ten beans I found there.

Boy was I happy to find those beans.

I was eating garbage and thrilled to do it.

So, that's very different from the life that we know

and since some of us had been through that,

that we wanted to be sure

that our children never went through that.

So, we tried to build up the little bank accounts and

get a car for the wife and a car for us.

Wash the you know, cars ourselves

with the horse with the kids.

There are many sweet beautiful aspects of that.

The best scene of all really is family life.

Why our society insist on making heroes men or women

out of people who can't stay married and have had 19 women.

God is that a stupid reversion of values.

Having one wife, staying married to her

that's what we're supposed to do.

It works out better with the kids.

But the American home began to fall apart I think seriously

partly because of effects of world war two in the 1950's.

That's when the divorce explosion as it's called began.

As to what I wanted for my kids there was on one side

the economic security

that they would have enough cloths,

enough food, and roof over their head so that you know,

be able to go to school, and have a bike and all those simple things.

Unfortunately,

well, I succeed in that

in regard for them.

I would not grade myself terribly high as a father might.

My sons are kind enough

to say complimentary things about me as a father,

but I was very far from satisfied

with myself as I look back at my role

in that particular drama.

I have been arguing ever since that.

Our culture and society is very good at training people.

We train them to pull teeth, to repair automobiles,

to paint fences, to do brain surgery.

We give them no training literally

and the two most important roles

they will ever be called upon to play

marriage partner and parent

and that you're just thrown into the water, hope you can swim.

Oh, I'm sorry you're getting divorced,

well, your children are sick.

And it's happening now in

probably half the cases of marriage in this country.

It's an ongoing tragedy.

I can see now that

anybody and certainly myself included, since I'm a body

need training of

just a book anything, a magazine article,

a priest talking to you on a park

be it something, we needed to be told

how to be a father for the man

and how to be a husband.

Nobody ever explained anything to me.

I hadn't seen any example of my own life.

My father died when I was an infant.

So, there was no example

and I simply never learned it.

So, I was finally able to piece myself together

and be a good father to my fourth son,

but I don't think I was that great a father.

I love my three sons, the first three

dearly, still do, we get along great.

But

I thought all you had to do was love them,

occasionally mention that fact to them,

give them a hug once in a while after they you know,

at least up to the age of seven or eight

and that was basically all there was to it. And boy was I wrong.

You have to spend much time with them.

You probably have noticed

that either in the 60's or a 1,000 years from now or last night,

the sons of public figures, sons and daughters of public figures

have a decided disadvantage,

whether those public figures are presidents

or senators or movie actors or rock stars.

The reason is very simple, daddy is on the road a lot.

He's out campaigning for office.

He's doing a concert in Nashville.

And suddenly he looks over his shoulder and

oh, junior is on dope.

Well, maybe the fact that I didn't see him that much

from two to fourteen had something to do with that.

You bet it did.