Fast, fun, and scary 18 years

Sandy and Luke Southern at signing day.

There were times when I wondered if this day would ever come. Now it’s here and everything is happening so fast.

On May 29, 2001, my wife gave birth to our first son together but our third child in our blended family. On May 31, 2019, Luke Southern will graduate from B.F. Terry High School in Rosenberg. The 18 years in between have been quite a ride.

When Luke was born, he was immediately whisked away and placed under and oxygen tent. He had trouble breathing due to being born in the high altitude of Colorado. It didn’t take long for his tiny body to adjust. Although that was a minor hiccup, it kind of set the tone for his life.

He has always been a kind, loving, happy-go-lucky kid. When he was a year old, he was standing on the toilet and fell off, fracturing his leg. He never cried or complained. The doctor said it was so minor there was nothing we could do, so he went from just having learned to walk to crawling again for a few weeks. It was a short time later when he started walking again that his big trauma came along.

We had floor-to-ceiling windows in our kitchen and one day we had the windows open. Luke toddled over and pushed the screen out. He fell about three feet face-first onto the concrete below. His face was a bloody mess and we had no idea how seriously he was hurt. The most helpless feeling I’ve ever had in my life was the moment I handed him over to the paramedics and they strapped him onto a stretcher and raced him to the hospital.

Fortunately, nothing was broken, and the worst of the damage were the scrapes on his face, which quickly healed. Over the next few years he proved to be quite accident prone, including a little tumble that split his ear open. We started calling him Boo Boo Bear until he started answering to that instead of his name (which had become Luke … Luke … LUKE!).

When Luke was 4, he was diagnosed with celiac sprue, an intolerance to gluten. It basically means he is allergic to wheat, rye and barley. It’s made for some dining challenges over the years, but nothing we couldn’t overcome. As a result of his diet, Luke is the thinnest and healthiest in the family.

As I mentioned before, Luke is very happy-go-lucky. He was never interested in sports and he dropped out of Boy Scouts early on. He just got along in school, never getting spectacular grades but always able to grasp what he was being taught. We’ve known for a long time that Luke probably wasn’t going to go to college, which was fine, but we didn’t want him to grow up to dig ditches or flip burgers either.

It was the summer after he finished eighth grade that he discovered his passion. He joined a junior high program at Lamar High School that built a kit car. That sparked a love for cars and a passion for working on them. He took all the automotive technology classes he could in high school and even earned dual credit in the process.

This fall, Luke will return to classes, this time taking diesel mechanics at Texas State Technical College. I’m very proud of him. Based on what they told us at TSTC, he stands a very good chance of getting a job right out of school making as much or more than I do with a four-year college degree and 32 years of professional experience.

In the meantime, he’s got his 18^th birthday, graduation, and a whole slew of family coming in to celebrate.

So Luke, allow me this moment to tell you how happy I am for you and how proud I am of the man you’ve become. You’ve had a remarkable journey that I’ve only just touched on here. My advice to you is to enjoy this time and celebrate this new chapter in your life. Never lose your smile or your sense of humor – you’re going to need them in life.

Work hard, be happy, and keep your faith! May God bless you always!

Smoking brings out the worst in people

It was recently announced that Walmart and Sam’s Clubs across the country will be raising the age to buy tobacco products from 18 to 21, with an exception for active military with ID.

The Texas Legislature is also contemplating a similar move statewide. I wholeheartedly applaud these moves.

Smoking is one of my biggest pet peeves. (For the record, when I talk about smoking, I’m including vaping, e-cigs, joints and any and every other form of recreational inhalant.)
I don’t know what bothers me more, the violation of having vile, smelly pollutants involuntarily forced upon me, or the arrogant, uncaring selfishness of the smoker. I’m a very character-driven person and I find smokers to be seriously lacking in that regard.

I was subjected to second-hand smoke throughout my childhood and early adult years. I hate it and I hate what it did to me. I hate seeing what smoking does to people. I got into many heated arguments about smoker’s “rights” over the years, mostly with people in positions of authority over me. Fortunately, the laws have since been on my side and supported my position and my smoke-free rights.

I fear, however, that the pendulum is beginning to swing back the other way and that has me gravely concerned. From the growing trend of artificial cigarettes to the state-by-state push to legalize the recreational use of marijuana, we are seeing smoking making a major comeback at a time when, ideally, it should be eradicated.

I fail to understand why anyone would even consider starting that nasty habit. There isn’t a person in this country who hasn’t been taught from an early age that all smoking and tobacco use is bad for you. The link to cancer, emphysema and many other diseases and health problems is indisputable. Children who are subjected to second-hand smoke are at greater risk of illness such as SIDS, asthma, and allergies. The addictive nature of tobacco and the extreme difficulty in breaking its grasp are well documented and profound. So why anyone would even think of trying it is beyond me.

In order to start smoking, it means you are wantonly ignoring not only the health risks to yourself, but also your loved ones and others around you. That is an intensely selfish character trait. In many cases, people take their first puff because they have caved in to peer pressure. Being a weak-willed follower is just another character flaw in smokers. There are some who try it out of curiosity to know what it’s like. Curiosity is understandable, but you don’t have to pee on an electric fence to see how it works.

When I say that smokers are selfish, I mean it. There is only one person in the room who derives any kind of pleasure out of smoking and that’s the person doing it. It is of no benefit at all to anyone, including the smoker. In fact, it’s an irritant. It subjects everyone else to the harmful effects of second-hand smoke. It stinks and the odor lingers on people and things long after the cigarette has been extinguished. It’s also rude to make everyone around you suffer with that disgusting filth just because you want to satiate a selfish desire for a nicotine fix.

Smokers are so caught up in themselves that they don’t stop to think about how their habit affects others, even beyond second-hand smoke. Their little five- and 10-minute smoke breaks affect production at work. So does the time they lose due to illness that is directly or indirectly related to smoking. When they are not doing their job, it means some else is picking up the slack or stuck waiting on the smoker.

When the inevitable illness strikes, it means family members must sacrifice their own time to aid and comfort the ailing smoker, which has its own domino effect on society and the economy.
Whenever a smoker undergoes medical treatment for cancer or other smoking-related illness, the cumulative effect is increased medical expenses for everyone. Insurance costs go up because it costs more to cover what is essentially a preventable disease.

In case you haven’t noticed, smokers are responsible for 100 percent of all cigarette butts littering the ground. Cigarette butts are one of the largest sources of litter in the country. They are further proof that smokers are self-centered because they do not care enough to clean up after themselves and leave their mess for others to deal with.

The claim that cigarette butts are biodegradable and quickly decompose doesn’t hold a drop of water with me. I have spent countless hours voluntarily cleaning up roadsides, trails, and waterways and know better. Cigarette butts can and will last for years. I fail to see how discarded butts benefit anyone other than the thoughtless litterbug.

If there is any remote upside to cigarettes, it’s the high taxes on them. That’s a voluntary tax paid by smokers and the money helps the economy. On the other hand, the money smokers spend on their habit is lost to them and can’t be used to the betterment of their lives or the lives of their families. It’s literally money gone up in smoke.

If this rant seems harsh, it’s meant to be. Smoking is harsh and cruel. At this point there are probably a lot of readers who agree with me and are sharing this column with friends and family because I have put into print what they have been feeling or saying all along.

There are others who probably want to kick my teeth in and stab out a thousand cigarette butts on my carcass for calling them selfish and weak-willed because they choose to smoke. So be it. As the saying goes: the truth hurts.

Additionally, I am really worried about the push across the nation to approve recreational use of marijuana. Everything I have said about cigarettes applies to marijuana and more. Not only does marijuana bring with it the same problems as cigarettes, but it also means the smoker is probably buzzed or totally stoned. If you think drunk driving is a problem, this is worse.

The use of marijuana puts us at risk from drivers who are not in complete control of their faculties. Some of these same people are major cogs in the wheels that move society and run our economy. If you have a worker trying to drive or operate machinery, or a manager making multi-million-dollar decisions under the influence, you’re only inviting disaster. Marijuana also negatively impacts your ability to parent and relate with others, including your spouse, family members, and employers.

That’s why I feel that we must not only uphold our marijuana laws, but we need to add teeth to them and increase their enforcement. Anything we can do to discourage all smoking is to the benefit of society and is worth pursuing, including banning all artificial smoking in places where smoking is already prohibited. Raising the age to buy tobacco products is a great start. To do anything less is a moral and ethical failure.

Honoring three special moms

I lost my mother five years ago.

It’s OK, really. I loved her and miss her, but I’ve moved on. So has my dad. He went and got me and my brothers a new mom about four years ago, and boy did he pick a winner!

Barbara is my step-mother, which is a title I really don’t like to use. She’s my mom now and I love her dearly. The whole family does. She has made in immediate and lasting impact on the family that we are grateful for. The change she has made in my dad is beyond incredible.

For starters, despite her cooking like a gourmet chef, she got my dad to lose more than 100 pounds! I haven’t seen him this trim since the days before disco. The physical transformation doesn’t stop there. Dad has a gleam in his eyes and a countenance we’ve not seen since before my mother got sick in 2000.

Since marrying Barbara, Dad has become a new man. Although he’s always been a believer, he now lives a life passionately after his faith in Christ. I’ve heard him lead more prayers in the last four years than I have in the previous 50 combined, and we live 1,000 miles apart! Not only that, but they’ve become globetrotters. I think they’ve been to every continent outside of Antarctica, Australia, and Africa, and they’ve been pretty close to each of them. This is the same man who rarely took his family anyplace outside of visits to grandparents in California and Nebraska.

This man who scrimped and penny-pinched my whole life now relishes going out and spending my inheritance. Thanks to Barbara, Dad has experienced more life and seen more of the world than he ever dreamed of. They’ve become incredibly engaged in family and spend a lot of time with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

When Dad got sick last fall, Barbara went into full nurse/caretaker mode and led him through one of the most difficult chapters of his life. She has kept us updated on his progress through texts and phone calls and has him back in excellent health. She is also very tech savvy for one of her generation and we regularly interact with her on Facebook.

Barbara is a real dynamo and someone I feel very fortunate to have in my life. As long as I’m talking about mothers, there are two more I’d like to mention. The first is my wife, who is the proud mother of my three sons and step-mother to my daughter. Sandy continues to rock my world! Although we’ve had more than our fair share of struggles in 19 years, she has persevered and thrived.

In that time, I’ve seen her earn her bachelor’s degree in business administration and her master’s degree in health care administration all while working full time, and sometimes working more than one job. She has been active in Boy Scouts and is not only Wood Badge trained, she is also a Wood Badge instructor and a former Cubmaster.

She is a very godly woman who is committed to her faith and very active in our church. She is also very much in charge of our family. Sandy is the one who keeps the books, pays the bills, cooks many of the meals, makes sure kids get where they need to be, manages the master schedule, and knows where every “missing” thing is or should be.

Throughout all of this, she has also developed and written a healthcare plan, which is something she is very passionate about. Getting anyone in government to listen to her has been the problem. She has presented it to U.S. Rep. Pete Olson, but it hasn’t moved from there. Even the state government could benefit from it, but getting a response from Austin is near impossible.

Yet through all of this, Sandy still finds time to sew. She enjoys making costumes, especially renaissance era outfits.

Sandy is a remarkable woman and a great wife and mother. These are traits she gets from the third woman I wanted to talk about – Sandy’s mom, Jerry Snyder. She, too, is a very godly woman who is dedicated to Christ and her family. When Sandy’s parents lost their jobs during the dot.com bust of the early 2000s, they moved to Florida and became missionaries with Wycliffe Bible Translators. Upon retiring a couple years ago they made the move back to Texas to be closer to family.

Jerry, who is very much another mom to me, has become a very talented watercolor artist. She and Sandy’s dad are also globetrotters. Between touring and mission work you never know where they’ll be. Right now they’re busy building a beautiful home in Kerrville.

I consider myself a very fortunate man to have such amazing moms in my life and in the lives of my children. (The same goes for the dad’s, but this is a Mother’s Day column.) Thank you, Sandy, Jerry, and Barbara for all of your love, dedication, and influence. May God bless each of you always!

A Star Wars follow-up

In my column last week I talked about the first Star Wars Celebration 20 years ago and had interviews with Dan Madsen and Anthony Daniels. Here is the story behind the story. I had the column written and the page ready to release to press when I got a response to a request I made for an interview with Daniels, the actor best known for playing C-3PO. He called me last Tuesday morning, literally moments before I released the page. We did about a 20-minute interview and I quickly inserted his comments into the column and had the page re-done.

What neither of us knew at the time is that a mutual friend was dying. Peter Mayhew, the gentle giant who played the Wookiee Chewbacca, passed away that evening. He was 74. I’ve interviewed Peter several times and have seen him many times on the comic con circuit. Although I doubt he and his lovely wife Angie know me by name, they did recognize me and visited with me at conventions. We also had quite a few interactions on Facebook and Peter even used one of my photos as his profile picture for a while.

His loss hit me pretty hard. Peter wasn’t like a typical celebrity. He very openly embraced the fans and made friends everywhere he went. So many of us got to know him because he was in the Star Wars movies. We got to love him because he gave so much of himself back to the fans. He even has a charitable foundation that helps people in need (www.petermayhewfoundation.org). We are all fortunate to have had him in our world and in a galaxy far, far away. May the Force be with you, Peter. Rest in peace, my friend.

20 years of Star Wars magic

Dan Madsen, right, finds himself on hold as Anthony Daniels
takes a call from the main stage at the first Star Wars
Celebration, held 20 years ago in Denver.

Everyone has cornerstone events in their lives that alter the trajectory of their very existence.
One of my biggest ones came 20 years ago in the rain and mud when my girlfriend and I joined a sea of tens of thousands of fellow Star Wars fans at the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum in Denver for the first Star Wars Celebration.

The event itself wasn’t life-changing, but I’ll address that in a minute. The first Star Wars Celebration was held April 30 through May 2, 1999. It may seem like it was a long time ago in a city far, far away, but for me it was like yesterday. I was born and raised in the Denver area and was an instant Star Wars fan for life the minute the original movie zoomed across the silver screen before my nearly 12-year-old eyes in 1977.

I was a veteran of several comic cons by the time the celebration rolled around but my girlfriend was a convention rookie. She was wide-eyed and awestruck when we first walked into the museum and all things Star Wars came at us in a rush.

The celebration was the first such fan event for Star Wars and it was designed to help launch “Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace.” Thanks to the connectivity of Facebook I was able to reminisce about the event with the man who made it all happen, Dan Madsen, along with C-3PO himself, Anthony Daniels.

“We had a momentous time putting that one together,” Madsen told me in a phone interview.

Madsen has the distinction of being the founder of both the official Star Wars and Star Trek fan clubs, among others. He was the owner of FANtastic Media, which published fan magazines and sold merchandise. He was approached by Steve Sansweet of Lucasfilm about holding some kind of fan event to help kick off the first prequel movie.

“I flew out with my team and we met with them for a day or two days,” Madsen said.

During the meeting it was determined that Lucasfilm wanted a “convention-type event.”

“We came back to Denver and hit the ground running,” Madsen said.

They decided to hold the celebration in Denver because it was centrally located in the United States and Madsen and his team were already in position there. With the Mile High City’s big convention centers already booked, however, Madsen and his team of about 100 employees hunted around for a venue that could accommodate about 10,000 people. What they found was Wings Over the Rockies and its giant hangar-turned-museum. As cavernous as the venue was, it still wasn’t big enough. Two large tents were erected outside to house the main events stage and a secondary stage.

The next step was to get registrations. The word was put out in the “Star Wars Insider” magazine that Madsen published and in press releases sent to media around the world.

“This was just prior to the Internet taking off,” he said.

Anthony Daniels, the actor best known for playing C-3PO, came on as the master of ceremonies.

“He was one of the saving graces,” Madsen said.

“It had been 16 years since the last Star Wars things had happened,” Daniels said in a phone interview from London.

Daniels came out a couple weeks early to help get things organized. He almost wasted his time.

“Two weeks before the event was the Columbine High School shooting,” Madsen said.

“It was one of the first massacres and it left us … We didn’t know what to do,” Daniels said.

Lucasfilm wanted to call it off. Madsen and Daniels objected and called on Denver Mayor Wellington Webb to intervene. Webb convinced Lucasfilm that the event was what Denver needed to help the healing process. With the event back on, it was turned into a fundraiser for the families of the victims of the shooting.

“We sent a message that these people who do these ugly things aren’t going to win,” Daniels said.

At that point everything looked good. Vendors were in place, artifacts and movie props were on display, actors from the new movie were set to appear, and ticket sales more than doubled expectations.

On opening morning, Daniels opened the curtains in his hotel room to look out at the mountains. They weren’t there.

“I couldn’t see them. It looked like some kind of a joke,” he said.

Heavy rainclouds settled over the Front Range.

“That weekend we got the worst rain in 90 years,” Madsen recalled.

Daniels rushed to the venue and upon seeing long lines of drenched fans, he opened up the tents and let people in to get out of the rain. The tents had been erected on an old runway that was now grass covered. It became a sodden swamp under the trampling feet of 20,000 force-full fans. Plywood boards and wooden pallets were hastily dropped into place to make walkways, but they sank into the muck almost as fast as they were put down.

Ironically, the miserable weather served as a uniting force for attendees.

“Out in the lines people were smiling and making the best of it,” Daniels recalled.

“One of my favorite memories was seeing the camaraderie of the fans as they stood through the mud and rain,” Madsen said.

It was while standing in a long line on one of those makeshift sidewalks that I had my cornerstone moment. With plenty of time to talk, I asked my girlfriend to marry me. Sandy said yes and in December we will celebrate our 20^th anniversary.

Star Wars has always been a big part of our lives. We’ve never attended another Star Wars Celebration, but we’ve never missed the opening day of a Star Wars movie.

As memorable as the celebration was for us, Daniels recalls it as a “Woodstock-type experience.”

“It’s a badge of honor that you were there,” he said, adding that Madsen deserves a lot of credit for working through the tragedies of Columbine, the weather, and the financial fallout after it was over. “Dan was left to pick up those pieces,” he said.

Daniels said he talks at length about the celebration experience in his new book that comes out in

November called “I am C-3PO: The Inside Story.” He called that first celebration “a key moment in the fan life of Star Wars.”

As for Madsen, he has attended four or five of the celebrations and just returned home from the one two weeks ago in Chicago. He said it was the best one he has seen yet. It was at that celebration that the trailer for “Star Wars: Episode IV: The Rise of Skywalker” debuted.

“I have high expectations for that movie,” he said. “This is the one that fans have been waiting for. I think it’s going to wrap up the Skywalker saga beautifully.”

“I had the best time working on it,” Daniels said. “I think it’s a very satisfying conclusion to the Skywalker story.”

Naturally, Sandy, I, and our children will be at the opening night screening in December. With today’s digital technology we won’t have to stand in line to buy tickets, but I will always remember standing in line for Star Wars and coming away with the love of my life!

Dan Madsen signs autographs at the Star Wars Celebration in
Chicago.

Anthony Daniels' new book comes out
in November.

Sandy and Joe with R2-D2 and C-3PO.

Sandy literally ran into Anthony Daniels at the celebration.