The Box Circle (ePub)

I was born to Al and Edna Follmar in Oceanside, California in December of 1943. There, I was able to
spend precious moments with my Marine Corps father before he was dispatched to the World War II Pacific Theater. In his absence, my mother and I moved back to my grandparents’ home in Roanoke, Virginia, where we lived until my father’s return in 1945. Then, as a young family, we moved to Salem where I lived for the next seventeen years.

In 1962, I left Salem to attend Bridgewater College. In 1964, my uncle invited me along with his daughter to attend the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Because my uncle was a national committeeman, he was able to get credentials for my cousin and me to be seated on the convention floor. For me, the experience was an awakening. There I met freedom riders and listened to their stories. I heard speeches delivered by Hubert Humphrey and Robert Kennedy, and on the last night of the convention, my cousin and I gave up our credentials so that the Mississippi Freedom Delegation, rejected by the credentials committee, could be rightfully seated. The highlight of my experience there occurred on the steps of the convention center where I shook hands with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Over the next four decades, I taught school, raised a family, and became a volunteer EMT on Lake of the Woods Fire and Rescue in Wilderness, Virginia. It was there that I wrote and had published my fi rst two books, EMT: BEYOND THE LIGHTS AND SIRENS (a portion of which was printed in Reader’s Digest) and EMT: RESCUE, based on my experiences serving as a medic and an EMT Instructor in my community. I received several community awards and was the recipient of the 2001 Outstanding Virginia Prehospital Care Provider.

It was in 1996, while in Salem assisting in the care of my ailing father, that I took evening courses at Hollins College, and it was in my creative writing classroom that Coralee Jordan took her fi rst breath. But

Dieses eBook können Sie uneingeschränkt auf allen Geräten der tolino Familie lesen. Zum Lesen auf sonstigen eReadern und am PC benötigen Sie eine Adobe ID.