So here's the short of it, 
 Pineville, Kentucky.

 And here's the long


Pineville.  I began 5th grade here. That three story building in the front was the Elementary School. It was grades 1-6.  I was only in the 5th grade for a few weeks and then Dad's Army Reserve Unit was called up because of the Berlin Wall Crisis. It was 1961. We had just moved to Pineville;  I didn't know anyone and was just beginning to make friends. It must have been just about my 10th birthday when I started to hear the words Checkpoint Charlie, and noticed the serious turn of adult conversations.  It seems as though Dad was gone very soon, and then before we knew it we were packed up in a moving van and Mom was driving us across the country on the way to Fort Smith, Arkansas where we would be for the rest of that school year and most of the summer. 

We were back in Pineville by the beginning of the next school year.  My 6th grade classroom is the second set of windows from the left on the third floor.  The set of windows in the middle of the 3rd floor was the library, and I would spend at least two hours every day in the library doing assignments my teacher made for me and helping the "little kids" check out library books.  The years fairly flew by.  The Junior High, grades 7 and 8, were housed on the third floor in the building that's perpendicular to the elementary school. The High School was that two story building at the left rear of the picture.

I never really went back to Pineville except for visiting Mom and Dad after I left for college that fall of 1969. But the years in that small mountain community had a long lasting impact on who I would become.