In honor of my hero - Boots Hodge

ON FREEMAN “BOOTS” HODGE

Boots was born either June 1^st or June 2^nd.  The man with two birthdays.  His mother Alice said it was the first.  The state said otherwise.  His mother wasn’t the kind of woman one wanted to argue with.   Neither was his father.  Flavius Hodge carried a gun on his hip and rode a horse for transportation.  His grandmother was supposedly a Choctaw princess, his grandfather, according to legend, was an outlaw on the run in the Oklahoma territory.  These are only pieces of the early legend of Freeman “Boots” Hodge.  In truth, very little was known about his grandparents on his father’s side.  His father, Flavius was a half-breed who didn’t own a car until the 1950s.  Evidently he wasn’t the kind of man you messed with.

Boots came from a big family.  There were seven kids.  They, like many families in those days, called each other nicknames that stuck through the rest of their lives.  His older sister’s name was Gal.  Boots had a brother named Buster, who looked almost identical to him after they’d both lost their hair and wore horn-rimmed glasses.  We thought we had two Grandpa Boots the first time we saw him.  “Two Grandpa’s was like having two Santa Clauses!”  He had another brother named Pee-Wee and one named Buddy.  Tobe and Pete didn’t get as colorful nicknames but they were spoken about fondly by the rest of the family.   They lived in New Mexico and western Texas during the 1920s.  This was the dustbowl.   The hard times that followed him around for his entire childhood began in those wild, untamed, arid climes.  He grew up tough and quickly.  He grew to have grit.  He was put to work by the time he could mount a horse, which was about around the time he could walk.   They scraped and busted their tails from sun up to sun down and still barely had a pot to piss in.  He’d work all day only to find out the fella he’d labored for didn’t have a dollar to give him.  He’d sometimes have to settle for food or practical items as forms of trade.  Boots learned early on how to be resourceful.    He also learned that family, a strong one, could survive anything.

The event that would end the challenging chapter of his childhood would be World War Two.   He enlisted and was sent to the South Pacific, the Solomon Islands, Guadalcanal to be more specific.  Four of his brothers fought overseas during the war.  His family had no idea where those boys were for three to four years.  Boots snuck a reference to the Bible and Solomon into one of his letters and it made it past the censors.   Alice Hodge had dark hair when Boots left in 1942 and white when he got back in 1945.  Boots never once talked about the war.  He never watched a single war movie.  He had nightmares so violent and horrific that he rarely slept through the night without a violent episode.    He remarked later that he was surprised and grateful his wife Madie put up with him.   Madie was equally special in her temperament as he was and they made the perfect couple.  She was patient and kind hearted to the ninth degree.  Snippets gathered from visiting war buddies over the years began to imply that Boots saw and experienced the worst of the seven hells.   All he’d say about it was, “You can have a unit of men march and fight through the jungle and when they come out the other side you’ll have as many different versions of what happened as there are men left to tell about it.”  He lost a lot of buddies in those jungles.   It is unclear but he once insinuated that he’d been a sniper of sorts perched atop a jungle tree and taken out many a “Jap”.  It was made to me in reference of his plan to shoot a dog that was harassing his cattle.  He could put an eye out from some extraordinary distance was the initial hint, and something along the lines of that’s what he did over there from a treetop.   One story he did relay openly to me on one of my magical Sunday visits after his wife passed and I was in college, goes thusly:  He was unloading a ship and was bringing a load to shore when the ship was struck by a torpedo and blown to pieces right before his eyes.  He’d missed it by minutes.  Another time he ducked to tie a bootstrap and a shell flew right over his back.  His unit was lost and he wondered around the theater for a while, joining with different units along the way.  He drove a bulldozer for one unit and may or may not have had a pet monkey. 

The years that followed the war were difficult ones for him and his otherwise stoic resolve.  He did what he always did and sucked it up and moved through it.  The first great step forward was meeting the true love of his life, Madie Hudson in Whitharral Texas.   After their first encounter she went home and told her sister she’d met the man she was going to marry.  He’d found his salvation.

He worked for a pipeline in east Texas when his first son Tom was born.  Sue followed a couple of years later.   Opportunity came for him to start over in Missouri and so he moved his young family north and built from scratch a new life.  They lived in tiny shacks or at one point a barn.   He worked all the time and saved his money.   When Madie’s family came to visit they asked her what she was doing living in a barn?  But Boots promised her that if she’d stick it out he’d build her a house on some nice land.  It is unclear if he had his entire vision for his future then or if it came to him over time, but he eked out a living and finally was able to purchase a large plot of land that butted up to the Oklahoma boarder.  During the war the government had mined the larger older trees and what was left was underbrush and saplings.   There was a tiny two-room shack with an outhouse surrounded by budding forest upon rocky ground.  Again his family and hers wondered if he’d lost his mind.  What could he do with that forsaken place?  He worked construction by day and built Madie her house by night.   It took him awhile but he built that house practically by himself.  Tom, who was at the time ten years old and ready for serious labor, helped him.  Madie also worked her fingers to the bone to make that vision come true.  Sometimes a curious neighbor (by neighbor I mean a person who lived two miles away) would stop by and help out.  People were like that then.  Plus Boots, an imposing cowboy right out of the movies with his homespun philosophy and strong commonsense approach, made a good first impression that lasted a lifetime.   People automatically respected Boots.  While he was working construction all those years he’d stick around when the plumber would show up and he’d watch him work and ask him questions.  He did this with all the contractors until finally by the time he built his own house he knew how to do it all himself.   For a man with an eighth grade education he was a brilliant engineer.  He could envision something in his mind and make it into reality.  He never understood why no one in his family inherited that ability.   If he set his mind to something consider it done, no matter how ambitious.

When the house was completed Boots built a chicken coup and a milk barn.  He bought some chickens and a milk cow and set about making his property self-sufficient.   He plowed a garden and Madie worked it during the summers.  He called it his garden of life.  He explained how the garden of life sustains us.  Perhaps it was his Choctaw blood but he was a spiritual fellow even when thinking about something as mundane as a garden.  He’d tell Tom how the garden of life needed to have vegetables and things to sustain us but it also needed a watermelon.   And it was also very important to keep the weeds out of your garden.  He meant figuratively and literally.  He also planted roses.   The garden of life needed roses, too.   Tom spent more time with him than almost anybody and was the recipient of much of Boot’s profound wisdom.   They’d be working beside one another, usually for long distances of silence, when all of sudden Boots would straighten up and look off into the distant trees.  He’d sigh and say, “Son…”  And Tom would stop and look up at him.   “Don’t pick other people’s scabs.”  Tom would nod and they’d both go back to work.  Tom would work out what he meant by that and come away with the truth beneath the odd comment.   Everyone has scabs in their life, leave them alone and let them heal.  One of Tom’s many jobs was to herd the cattle up to the barn.  Boots would warn him not to stand behind those cows.  “They’ll kick the devil out of you.”  But sure enough, one day Tom was in a hurry and one kicked him square in the gut.  It knocked him to the ground where he writhed in pain, unable to catch his breath.  Boots walked past him and with his southern drawl said, “Well, I told ya not to get behind ‘em cows.”  Life was a lesson.   Tom didn’t have a curfew in high school.  If he came home late Boots would find something important for them to do at four in the morning.  Do what you want, but be ready to live with the consequences, was his philosophy.   He’d later turn those lessons into personal cards that he would send his children and grandchildren in the mail.   He sent this to his daughter Patty, my mother, when she was an adult with four kids.

“Good Judgment comes from experience, a lot of that comes from bad judgments.  Whenever you see darkness there is an extraordinary opportunity for the light to burn brighter. -Good luck with your back – Dad.”

Boots worked construction and his business partner was an old cowboy from Texas who’d made a lot of money in oil.  His name was Mr. Smith.  One of Boot’s favorite stories to tell was about this colorful man.  Mr. Smith drove an old beat-up pickup truck and wore overalls, looking like a dusty old farmer. The guy from the bank was there and Mr. Smith pulled up in his old truck and looking like he just milked a cow and the banker tried to warn Boots about going into business with that guy.  Boots didn’t say anything but, “Oh-kay,” and the banker told him he’d look into Mr. Smith for him to make sure he wasn’t making a mistake. Boots smiled and let him do the research needed to explain Mr. Smith’s economic status.   The banker came driving up, he jumped out and said, “You definitely should go into business with this guy.  You have any idea how much he’s worth?” Boots just smiled.  He did not believe in putting on heirs.  It was the sign of a weak man to try to impress others with his wealth or style.  “You can send a fool to college but all you’ll get is an educated fool.”

He wore the same denim shirt for as long as I could recall.  I later found out he had several denim shirts that all looked alike.  Cowboys boots, faded blue jeans, denim shirt with snap buttons because he’d cut his thumb off when he was an apprentice in Texas, large white, or slightly yellowed cowboy hat, this was his uniform.

The thumb story is a famous one in the legend of Boots Hodge.  He sliced it off when he was an apprentice in Texas.   The story goes that he sliced it off, picked up the severed piece, drove himself to the hospital but they couldn’t sow it back on and so he stood there calmly, holding the flap of skin against his hand while they stitched him up.   His pain tolerance is a large part of his legend.  He never took pain pills no matter how severe the injury.  It wasn’t that he had dulled nerve endings.  His tolerance came from a stubbornness of the mind, a mental toughness that refused to let pain interfere with his day.  He was so disciplined in everything he did.   He believed in putting off or foregoing gratification for what needed to be done.  He was up at four o’clock every morning and went about working his property all day long with a skip in his step, because he was doing what he loved. 

Eventually Boots grew weary of putting up with the fickle mind of housewives changing their minds with the wind and so he brought home four piglets and from there went into the hog business.  It was here his brilliance and ingenuity would shine.  Tom recalls the first time one of the pigs was giving birth, how it couldn’t handle the pain and chased its rear end around in circles until finally giving birth and killing the baby.   Boots fattened that pig up and sold her for her meat and then favored the pigs who gave birth easily and from there he went from four pigs to four thousand.  He revolutionized the pig farming industry.   He designed his operation in such a clever way so that it would only take Tom and Boots to work the entire thing.   Tom shoveled a lot of hog manure and feed in his young life.  Boots worked out a system for everything; from how the barns where constructed to the alleyways and shoots.  He realized that one of the biggest problems facing pig mortality was newborns being rolled onto by the mothers.  So he designed a trap door in the birthing cages that opened for the baby to fall through into some straw under a heating lamp.   So in the spring when most farmers were bringing three to four new pigs to the market, Boots brought a dozen or more.   He built a cage with two decks for his truck to drive them all to market.   He caught the notice of many people and a few college professors of agriculture came to see the operation and to study it.  He made them change clothes before they could go out there.  He didn’t want them getting his pigs sick.

While they worked extremely hard, Boots took his family on at least one vacation every year.   They’d go to Colorado and Wyoming.   He’d have his nephews, who lived up the road, look after the farm.     All the while his hog business continued to expand.  He built what would later feel like an entire town on his property with various sized barns and outbuildings.  He had it all organized with different sections for pigs recovering from giving birth, to areas for fattening them up, to weaning them.  After he retired from the business, his abandoned pig town turned into a fantasyland for his grandchildren.  It fueled my early imagination and we loved to have all sorts of fantastical adventures out there.  It was a magical place to grow up. For his children they had hundred of acres to ride their horses.  They explored the vast forest.  Boots would say, if you get lost try to find a fence and follow it home.  There was a spring fed pond with an enormous weeping willow tree that they’d swim in on hot summer days. 

When Tom was in high school he came to his dad, seated in his favorite recliner, in the place it would remain for sixty years.  Boots was reading the evening paper and Tom told him he’d like to try football.  Boots didn’t say much, maybe grumbled from behind the paper, peaked over the top and then went back to it.   Tom, feeling a bit rejected, shrugged and left the room.   The next day, when Tom returned from school, Boots handed him a pair of cleats.   He didn’t say anything else.   So Tom went on to try out for the team and he had his butt handed to him by an older boy.  He got pounded all week and began to hate the idea of playing football.   He was later embarrassed to admit that he seriously thought about quitting.  But there were those damned cleats.   Those cleats weren’t in the budget.  Boots had stretched to get them.  He was just starting out in his new pig farming business and things were tight.  Tom stuck it out and eventually, after college, became the football coach in Seneca.  He was by far the most successful coach in the history of that school and in fact one of the top in the entire state of Missouri.  He’s in the Missouri sports hall of fame for coaching.   The stadium in Seneca is named, Tom Hodge Stadium.  In a small southern town, high school football is the NFL.  Boots and his wife Madie collected all the articles written about their son.   They were both extremely proud of him. 

Boots would send Tom, then in high school or when he’d come back for summer break in college, to markets to buy up the runts and they’d bring them back and Boots would shoot them with boosters and fatten them up.  He was always thinking of new ways to improve his operation.    He was at a trade show many years later and saw his invention being demonstrated.  He recognized the guy who claimed the patent as one of the professors who’d visited.  The guy shrugged apologetically, and most likely frightened for his life, but Boots shrugged it off.  The guy said, “I looked and you didn’t have a patent on it, so…”  Boots had made plenty of money off of his invention, he didn’t need the glory for it.  He wasn’t one to hold a grudge.  He’d say, “Don’t waste your time or your money feeding your ego.”

He’d say, “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”  Or “The true measure of a man is how he handles a crisis.”

He was in the hog business for twenty years before debilitating headaches bothered him so much he decided to look into it.  He’d had skin cancer and probably wondered if the constant headaches weren’t something serious.  He never told Madie or his kids when he went to see his doctor but whenever he came back he explained that he was allergic to the pigs’ dander and would be selling them off.   He was going out of the hog business.  It must have been a difficult decision to make.  But Boots sucked it up and made it.  The headaches must have been horrendous for his pain tolerance.   Perhaps they were making him cranky?   He had grandkids by this point.   He doted on them.   He stopped cursing after I began to repeat everything he’d say.  He also stopped drinking.  He was never a hard drinker but he’d have a beer each night; sometimes Jack Daniels.  He gave it up to set an example to his grandchildren.

He often remarked how the ghosts of his war buddies would dance around his bed at night asking what went wrong with the country they died for.  In his mind his generation spoiled their children, because they didn’t want them to have the hard life they’d had, but it made them soft and weak and in turn they produced children even more spoiled and soft.   He foresaw America’s decline from the world’s greatest country to the limp bureaucratic nightmare it is today.  He didn’t think highly of politicians and the government.  He worried about one world government.  He said someday that’ll happen and we’ll all be in trouble.

His retirement plan was based on an idea he’d had perhaps all along; to section off his land into plots and to lease it to people with bad credit or who weren’t able to get loans.   When they would default he’d take the land back, but if they could pay it off then it was theirs.  Few of them did.   His plan is now helping his children in their retirements.  One of his big philosophies was about need versus want.  We only need a few things to sustain us.   The rest is what we want.  He’d say, “No luxury should be purchased with debt. When people tell you they need something, usually they’re confused about what that means.” 

To say a few words for a man who put little stock in words seems ironic.  He said, “No one can talk for more than five minutes without exposing the extent of his ignorance.”  He was a man of action.  He didn’t say I love you.  He showed it.  He wore the toughest exterior of any man I’ve ever known, but beneath that cowboy hat there beat a warm and kind heart.  That man loved his family.   “Kodak would go out of business if it weren’t for our family,” he’d say pointing with his half thumb at all the pictures on his walls.   As he got on in years, he’d say it every time you saw him.  

When his wife got sick he’d carry her up the stairs each night for bed and carry her down again in the morning.  When she was out of it towards the end, he picked her up one afternoon and she looked up at him with love drunk, teenager-eyes, all doughy and she said, “Wanna dance, cowboy?”  And he let her stand on his feet and they swayed back and forth for a moment and then he scooped her up and carried her up those stairs and sat with her until she fell asleep.   A large piece of him died when she did.  But he was too sturdy to show it and he bit his lip and his enormous adam’s apple would quiver and he mustered on.  That was a special time for him and me.  I was living in Joplin, going to school, and every Friday Aunt Sue would take my laundry back to their house, she lived with him, and I’d swing by every Sunday and pick it up and we’d have lunch and talk for an hour or more and then I’d head on down to Neosho to see my parents.  We did this every weekend for a year.  We grew very close.  He’d tell the stories he loved the most.   They usually had multiple meanings and were full of life lessons. 

Boots truly was a living legend, by definition.  He earned the respect of every man he’d encountered.  Boots Hodge.  He was an inspiration, a guide, a cowboy guru.  He was the cowboy John Wayne was pretending to be.   But at the end of the day John Wayne was just Marion Morrison and Grandpa was still Boots Hodge.

“In the battle between the stone and the stream the stream always wins because it’s persistent.” He’d write these nuggets of wisdom in his famous cards.  I don’t know that he came up with all of those himself, if he’d picked them up along the way or what, but he knew the importance of seeing the world in those types of terms.

Here’s a poem they found in this personal things. 

My Self

By Freeman “Boots” Hodge

I have to live with my self, and so

I want to be fit for myself to know,

I want to be able as days go by

Always to look myself straight in the eye,

I don’t want to stand with the setting sun

And hate myself for the things I’ve done

I don’t want to keep on a closet shelf

A lot of secrets about myself,

And Fool myself as I come and go

Into thinking that nobody else will know

The kind of man I really am

I don’t want to dress myself up in Sham

I want to go out with my head erect

I want to deserve all men’s respect

But here in this struggle for fame and pelf

I want to be able to like myself.

I don’t want to think as I come and go

That I’m bluster and bluff and empty show

I never can hide myself from me

I see what others may never see

I know what others may never know

I never can fool myself-and so

Whatever Happens I want to be

Self Respecting and conscience free

Boots

He was a man of extreme reason and intuition.  He lived in a world of logic.  If it didn’t make sense to him, then by God he wouldn’t do it.   And if it was broken, then by God he could fix it.    He did things HIS way.  He said to be happy; you need to be your own boss.  He said, don’t follow the crowd, go your own way.  Find your own path.  He taught us to think for ourselves.   Institutions were generally bad ideas.   The government had no right to tell us what to do.   He wouldn’t wear his seatbelt in the hopes of being pulled over just so he could explain to the cop what he thought about that particular communist law.   He’d say, “I think the seatbelt is the best invention since birth control, but the government has no right to tell a man, who fought for his country, that he HAS to wear it.” 

 He taught us the difference between religion and spirituality.  He didn’t need to go to church every Sunday.  In fact he refused.  He hated preachers.  All but one, a man named Griff, who wasn’t anything like any other preacher we’d ever known.  He was a special case and he earned the respect of Boots as he sat with Madie as she died. 

He was at Boot’s funeral and someone asked Griff if Boots had asked him a lot of tough questions during those times.  “No,” said Griff, “He pretty much just told me stuff.”  

Boots found God sitting on a stump at sunrise on his back forty watching a deer graze in the distance.  The irony to me was that people were always trying to “save” him.   If you were at his funeral and saw the amount of love and adoration being given to that great man, then maybe those folks would have all done better to follow his example.  Who needed to save who?  Was he perfect?  Of course not.  No one is.  Like everyone he was flawed, but that’s what made him who he was.  But damn if he wasn’t a very good human to live up to.  

He was an idol, a legend, a hero to his family and that extended beyond blood.  Boots was very active in the Warrens Branch Community, serving many years on the school board.  He was one of the original founders and leaders of ‘Busy Beavers’ 4-H Club.  He’d host mini rodeos on his land called shodoes. He’d plow the ground to make it softer and the kids would ride calves and horses.  He coached Tom’s baseball team and when they won first place he made it clear he didn’t want his name on that trophy.  It wasn’t about him.  He was a selfless man to the core.

We found the drafts for a few of the cards he’d sent to everyone and I’d like to include this here for posterity.  The following are the words of Boots Hodge to his family.

“Boots-isms”

Tom & Sue

“A hundred years from now, it won’t matter what my bank account was.  The sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove.  But the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child.”

Tom & Merlene

“The most certain sign of wisdom is to make your home a refuge from the rest of the world.”

Sue

“It is loving and giving that make life worth living.

And giving that love to children can make a difference in their life forever.  You can do a great job at that.”

- Have a good day  -Dad

Patty

“Good Judgment comes from experience, a lot of that comes from bad judgments.  Whenever you see darkness there is an extraordinary opportunity for the light to burn brighter. “

-Good luck with your back – Dad

“When you come to the end of your rope tie a knot and hang on.  Everyone gets the same 24 hours in a day, the difference is how you use it.”

Bobbie, Patty & Tera

“Just be yourself and never look back and don’t take life or death too seriously.  Making it in life is kinda like busting bronc’s.  Your going to get thrown a lot, the secret is getting back on.”

-Just an old Cowboys way of looking at it. Grandpa Boots

Pam

“By changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.  Never take the advice of someone who has not had that kind of trouble.”

-I think you have proven that, just be your own person you can’t please everyone. 

“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”

Merlene

“Anyone who says raising kids is not the most difficult job in the world is not doing it right.  Memories are your most valuable possessions.”

Travis

“There is not half the pleasure in processing an object as in the effort to attain it.

Let go of the what-If, don’t put your life on hold. 

Trust your hopes not your fears.

Optimism is a gift

The most certain sign of wisdom is a positive outlook.”

Marcy

“Grab happiness in the passing moments of life and never look back.”

“Never feel lonely in the kitchen, food is very friendly.”

“Treat your kids like you wanted your parents to treat you”

Mark

“Happiness is a byproduct of an effort to make someone else happy.  The most wasted days are the days when we have not laughed.  A happy marriage puts the marriage before the children. Two people loving equally is a rare occurrence.”

Tera

“You’ve got to be original, because if you are like someone else what do they need you for?”

Scott W.

“No matter what kind of backgrounds two men are from, if you go ‘Hey man, women are crazy’ you got a friend”

Josh and Amy

“Love begins in the eyes and quickly goes to the heart, and only sometimes ends up in the brain.” – Boots

Eric

“The greatest conflicts are not between two people but between one person and himself.”

Ryan

“Not everything can be made sense of

Your Eyes are the windows of your soul.

We are sometimes taken into troubled waters not to drown, but to be cleansed. 

Use your memory to make your life more enjoyable. 

Look back at your ancestors for strength; carry a can-do attitude with you. 

Banish the word ‘cannot’ from your vocabulary; every person is born with a talent. 

A good idea is usually risky,

The door to success is always marked ‘Push’

Contentment is worth more than Riches.”

Lacy

“Be afraid only of standing still.  Grab happiness in the passing moments of life.  We are sometimes taken into troubled waters, but not to drown but to learn how to swim.  Sometimes things that hurt-teach skill and confidence are an unconquerable force.  Every person is born with a talent, use it.”

“Don’t be discouraged by your mistakes.  Accept the good and run with it.  Opportunity sometimes knocks very softly.  Surround yourself with things that make you smile.”

Ross

“We are all treasure chests of talents.  In Sights and remarkable gifts we are judged by what we finish, not on what we start.  The secret of success is doing something you love.”

Tayler

“Never grumble, it makes you as welcome as a snake at a picnic.  Its best to keep your troubles pretty much to yourself cause half the people you tell them to won’t give a damn, and the other half will be glad to hear you have them.”

“Follow your hearts’ desire and it will lead you to great adventures.  For when you follow your heart life becomes joyful.”

Britnie

“You must do crazy things once in awhile to keep from going nuts.  Just don’t do anything that conflicts with common sense.  The best advice is don’t give it.”

Hudson

“Hey a true friend will tell you when your hats on backwards, just how did you get so stupid, well maybe it’s the company I keep.”

Hayden

“Its better to have one good friend than many acquaintances.  The most certain sign of wisdom is a positive outlook of a person is defined by what he makes of himself during his lifetime.”

Charlie

“Most folks are like a bob-wire fence.  They have their good points.  Nobody ever drowns himself in his own sweat.  Never joke with mules or cooks as they have no sense of humor.”

More….

“Today you don’t have to lift a finger, you are royalty, the hero of the day.  You don’t know about war, poverty or disease, you only know love, enjoy the moment.”

-Grandpa Boots

“If you have a loving family its amazing what you can do without.”

“Don’t pet a porcupine unless you are looking for trouble.  Life is an emotional journey.”

“No luxury should be purchased with debt”

“Never sacrifice your principles to please anyone”

“Aim at fulfilling whatever talents you have inherited.”

“Having an education is different than having plain ol’ horse sense.”

“You can ruin the present by worrying about the future”

“A stumble may prevent a fall.  Don’t put your life on hold”

“Trust your hopes not your fears”

“Just be yourself and never look back, and don’t take life or death too seriously.  Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none, your eyes are the windows to your soul.”

“Knowledge is a precious treasure that cannot be given away nor stolen.”

“After you climb to the top of the wall don’t kick over the ladder”

“Good fortune is usually the result of wisdom and hard work, not luck.”

“Optimism is a gift”

“There is no security on this earth only opportunity”

“Its no disgrace to fall down, the disgrace is not getting up and going ahead.”

“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up”

“An imagination can make reality more joy able”

“Its easier to accept love than to give it”

“Wisdom is sometimes disguised as foolishness”

“Don’t waste your time or your money feeding your ego”

“Just remember don’t pursue happiness, create it.”

“Kids need more hugs than they need things.”

“The greater the obstacles the more glory in over coming it.”

“You can never go wrong when you follow your dreams.”

“Never play leap frog with the unicorn”

“Never pet a porcupine.

If you carry yourself like a beauty people will think of you as one.”

“You can never step in the same river twice you can just about always stand more than you think you can.”

“No one can talk for more than five minutes without exposing the extent of his ignorance.”

“Watch what happens to a wagon when one wheel comes off”

“A good reputation cannot be bought for any amount of money”

“Intelligence is not enough, using intelligence wisely is the key”

“Respect yourself and others will respect you.”

“Happiness comes from a persons character”

“The squeaky wheel will be the first to get the grease, but if it keeps on squeakin’, it’ll be the first one to be replaced.”