My Autobiography

You may be wondering why I have written and published my autobiography.

Well... why not?

I suffer no delusions that my life is any more special than anyone else’s. I might think so, but I couldn’t possibly be biased, could I? I hope I’ve impacted a few other people’s lives in some positive way. But so have you. And so have most other people.

I believe everyone should document their life in one way or another. We all hold a special place in some other people’s hearts. You may think that nobody will care much about your life after you’re gone (or even while you’re still here), but I can assure you that’s not the case.

My parents were humble, unassuming people who wanted to live average, simple, and comfortable lives. People of their generation generally sought to conform to societal norms regarding career paths, family structure, and many other ways. My parents blended into the woodwork, which was just how they wanted it.

I gave my parents a book called To Our Children’s Children: Preserving Family Histories for Generations to Come. This book contains questions and thought prompts designed to help people recall memories and inspire them to write them down. I asked my parents to write some of the stories from their lives, using this book as a guide.

My mother gave it a good shot. She produced eight type-written pages describing several chapters of her life’s story. Within those eight pages, I learned some things about my mother I didn’t know before. Even for the stories I knew, it was nice to read them in her own words. There were chapters of her life she didn’t get to, but what she wrote was gold. I am so thankful to have what she wrote. It has inspired me to document the highlights from my life, at least up to 2024, for anyone who may be interested.

When she passed away, I formatted her story into a 12-page 8.5”x5.5” booklet with a couple of pictures and printed copies for everyone who came to her memorial service.

My father didn’t write anything, which was no surprise.

Let’s get the factual, demographic information out of the way first.

My full name is David Richard Hughes, although I have preferred “Dave” since third grade. I don’t know why. Maybe it sounded more casual or more cool.

I was born on February 24, 1957, in Springfield, Ohio, to John Herman Hughes (January 1, 1910-January 17, 2000) and Florence Bastress Hughes (June 16, 1918-April 23, 2003).

My father had married twice before. Both previous wives died. My brother John (June 6, 1936-December 17, 2006) was born to his first wife, and my two sisters, Dianne (b. April 29, 1943) and Charlotte (b. December 15, 1944), were born to his second wife. My parents’ marriage was my mother’s first, so I was my father’s fourth child and my mother’s first.

When I was born, my father was 47, my mother was 38, my brother was 21, and my sisters were 13 and 12. The kids being spaced so far apart made for a somewhat unusual family situation. In some respects, my childhood was like that of an only child.

We lived at 139 Kewbury Road, in a house my father had purchased in the mid-1940s, around the time my sisters were born. Kewbury was a small dead-end street with nine houses on one side and eight on the other. Technically, it wasn’t a dead-end since an alley at the end connected it to the next street. Nevertheless, a yellow diamond sign at the entrance to Kewbury Road proclaimed it a dead-end street. It has since been replaced by a yellow diamond sign that says ‘No Outlet,’ which I suppose sounds a little less morbid, especially considering there was a retirement home for old ladies at the end of the street.

Our house was small (1,154 square feet), with two bedrooms and one bath, a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room on the main floor, an unfinished basement, and an unfinished attic above the bedrooms on the left side of the house. By the time I was born, the attic had been finished and converted into a third bedroom. Before its conversion, it was my brother John’s bedroom. That’s right – he had to sleep in an unfinished attic with no heat or air conditioning.

We moved to Xenia, Ohio, a small town 20 miles south of Springfield, in 1965. My parents kept the house on Kewbury and rented it out until we returned in 1971. They remained in that house until they died – Dad in 2000 and Mom in 2003.

I graduated from Springfield North High School in June 1975 and from the Ohio State University in December 1979.

Here are the places I’ve lived since graduating from college. I will share stories about them in the chapters to come.

1980-1982: Columbus, Ohio

1982-1984: Dayton, Ohio

1984-1987: Gaithersburg, Maryland

1987-1988: Falls Church, Virginia

1988-1995: Annandale, Virginia

1995-present: Phoenix, Arizona; more specifically, the East Valley suburbs of Gilbert, Tempe, Ahwatukee, and (since 2006) Chandler.

Since I was born on February 24, 1957, I don’t remember anything about the 50s. I don’t remember the 1960 presidential election in which John F. Kennedy narrowly beat Richard M. Nixon. So I’ll start with the 60s.

My earliest memory was being fed jello in the back seat of our car. My mother drove to Columbus four times a year for the big quarterly sale at Lazarus, a huge department store. This store was such a destination that Lazarus operated four parking garages in the adjoining blocks. After my mother parked the car, she fed me jello before loading me into a stroller and pushing me through the store for her glorious shopping day.

During another trip, she accumulated so many purchases that I got crowded out of the stroller and had to walk for the rest of the day.

Lazarus amazed me. It was huge! They carried everything. It was truly a retail paradise. Their sidewalk window displays were festively decorated during the Christmas season. And of course, I got to visit Santa! They had an elaborate North Pole Village on the sixth floor – the same floor as the toy department, Nirvana to a young boy.

My first few years of childhood were happy and trouble-free. I could hardly appreciate it then, but I was the center of my mother’s world. My sisters Dianne and Charlotte were still in high school and they seemed to enjoy having a baby brother.

Another one of my earliest memories happened sometime when I was three. We had a parakeet, and occasionally it would escape from its cage. I remember Dianne and Charlotte frantically chasing it all over the house to catch it.

On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. I was sitting in my first-grade classroom when the PA system started blaring radio coverage of the event. The sound was poor so it was hard to make out what was happening or what was being said. It just sounded like urgent chaos. But we found out soon enough.

We moved to Xenia during the summer of 1965, during the civil rights movement. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964. The Voting Rights Act followed on August 6, 1965. Most of Springfield’s Black population lived in the southern part of town and we lived in the northern part, so none attended my school. Xenia was much smaller, so I had some Black kids in my class. I didn’t think much of it, but I could sense some racial tension as the country adapted to these new civil rights laws.

The 60s were notable for the emergence of rock music. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones took the US by storm. The Monkees began as a TV comedy show about a rock band but soon became an actual band. I was a huge fan. The Motown label brought Black singing groups such as the Supremes, the Temptation, and the Four Tops into the mainstream. Other vocal groups such as the Fifth Dimension, the Mamas and the Papas, and the Association dominated the airwaves later in the decade. It was a transformational decade for rock and pop music.

The summer of 1967 was dubbed the Summer of Love. As many as 100,000 young adults from all over the country converged in the Haight-Ashbury district and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. It became a huge communal environment of hippie culture, spiritual awakening, hallucinogenic drugs, anti-war sentiment, music, and plentiful sex.

1968 was a year of political and social upheaval. On April 4, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. On June 6, Robert F. Kennedy, brother of John F. Kennedy and the leading Democratic candidate for president, was assassinated. The chaotic Democratic National Convention in Chicago drew violent protests from people opposed to the Vietnam War.

The decade ended more positively when astronauts landed on the moon on July 20, 1969.

Springfield, Ohio, was a nice place to grow up from the late 1950s to the mid-70s. It was a typical mid-American, mid-sized, middle-class city with good schools, nice neighborhoods, and safe streets.

I could ride a bicycle by first grade. My parents gave me free rein to explore my surroundings as long as I was home in time for dinner. I happily pedaled all over the northern part of town, enjoying my freedom and making a mental note of all my surroundings. We had a chalkboard in the kitchen, mounted at my height in an out-of-the-way spot. In hindsight, I assume my parents put it there so I wouldn’t scribble on the walls and my mother could keep an eye on me. On that chalkboard, I could draw an accurate map of all the streets in our part of town – an area of at least one square mile. I rode my bike to school in first and second grade, a distance of just over a mile. Since I knew all the streets so well, I often varied my route.

I attended Snowhill Elementary School during Kindergarten, first, and second grade. Those were carefree times. I made friends easily and felt included. My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Patterson, was a kind, gentle lady who genuinely loved her students. She remained my favorite teacher throughout my school years.

Eleven years later, when I was a senior in high school, I visited Snowhill when a choir I was accompanying on bass performed there. I had some free time before our performance, so I wandered down the hall to my old first-grade classroom. Sure enough, Mrs. Patterson’s name was still on the door. I poked my head in to say hi. She immediately recognized me, despite having not seen me for ten years. I had grown from a first-grade boy to a high school senior. She ran up, hugged me, and introduced me to her class.

My mother and I attended Covenant Presbyterian Church. It was a large, majestic church that occupied half of a city block on the north edge of downtown Springfield. The sanctuary was stunning, with marble pillars, stained glass windows, and a high arched wood ceiling. The services were religious pageantry at its finest, with a huge, thunderous pipe organ and an enthusiastic choir. The entire building was a place of wonder. It had dozens of rooms on three floors, including a few mysterious, out-of-the-way rooms that were always locked.

Only my mother and I attended a Presbyterian church. My father was Catholic and my older siblings were raised Catholic. At the time, Catholics were only permitted to marry someone of a different faith if they agreed to raise the children as Catholics. The fact that I was an exception to this rule illustrates that I was my mother’s child for all intents and purposes.

Perhaps the fondest memory of my childhood in Springfield was the summer days spent at the Olympic Swim Club. The pool was 50 meters long (the length of pools used in the Olympics), which was twice as long as most other pools. It was sideways-T-shaped, and the side branch was a 10’ deep diving area with two one-meter diving boards and one three-meter diving board. The pool was huge. It was often packed with people. I took swimming lessons in the mornings. I learned to swim easily and became very comfortable in the water. I spent many hours at the pool most days.

When I was five, they added a gigantic water slide. It wasn’t one of the fancy slides waterparks have today, with twists and turns and covered tubes. It was simply a tall scaffold-like structure with a metal ladder and a flat, straight metal slide that deposited riders into the 5’ end of the pool near a ladder. It was around 12’ tall, which to a 5-year-old kid seemed mountainous.

I was bound and determined to ride that slide. I frequently asked my mother’s permission, but she always said no. Occasionally, she and my father would come to the pool after work. They would swim the length of the pool (always sidestroke, facing each other). At that age, I was limited to playing in the 3’ end of the pool, but they would sometimes tell me to meet them at the 5’ end when they completed their sidestroke lap and I could jump into the deeper water from the side of the pool.

One time, I misheard my mother. She said, “Do you want to go off the side?” I thought she said, “Do you want to go off the slide?” I was delighted! I couldn’t believe she finally changed her mind and would let me ride down the slide! So while they swam down to the 5’ end, I gleefully got in line for the slide.

When they reached the other end of the pool, they looked around but didn’t see me. Finally, they noticed a commotion at the slide. They spotted me sitting at the top of the slide, terrified to go down the long, steep incline. The lifeguard climbed the ladder to the top, set me on his lap, and we rode down together.

Having survived that ordeal, I learned that the big, tall slide wouldn’t kill me. In fact, it was thrilling. (Riding down the slide on the lap of a hunky teenage lifeguard was thrilling too. But at the time I was too terrified to process that and too young to appreciate it.) From that time on, I rode down the slide by myself fearlessly and often.

When we moved back to Springfield after my eighth-grade year, the Olympic Swim Club had been purchased by the city and turned into the Springfield Municipal Pool. The features were the same, but the crowds seemed smaller. There were no memberships; people paid each time they visited. I didn’t realize until later that the Olympic Swim Club, being a private club, excluded non-white people.

During those years, my father was the County Engineer for Clark County. For whatever reason, that was an elected position. I remember seeing Dad’s name on billboards as we drove around town in 1964, an election year. And for whatever reason, elections for city positions were partisan. Mom and Dad were die-hard Republicans. In 1964, the Republican candidate for president was Barry Goldwater. Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide. That impacted the down-ticket elections as well. Dad lost the election, so he was out of a job.

He found a job as the County Engineer for Greene County, the next county to the south. It was a hired position, not elected. So we moved to Xenia, the county seat. My parents kept the house in Springfield and rented it while we lived in Xenia. Six years later, Dad retired and we returned.