Page 34 - Amarillo Senior Link Magazine Fall 2021 - Online Magazine
P. 34
Donald Sherman
From New York to Amarillo,
by Way of Vietnam
was home, I wouldn’t go in till
someone got home. One night,
I was in bed, and I heard a loud
noise in my room; it started and
stopped three or four times; then
it got very loud, and I started
screaming like a little baby. My
mother came running in and
turned on the light, and it turned
out that the noise was a piece of
wallpaper coming down. Thank
goodness, we only lived in that
house about a year. In 1961,
my parents bought a house in
Geneva, New York. This house
was a lot newer than the haunted
one in Seneca Castle, as it was
built around the 1890s. We were
living there when I got out of
high school in 1970.
At that time, the military wasn’t
very popular, but all the men in
my life were Veterans, and my
stepfather was a fireman on an
Army base close to where we
lived. My stepfather was also a
member of the local American
Legion Post, which had about ten
acres of land, with 200 feet of lake
frontage and a large swimming
pool. During the summer, we
was born in February of 1952, in Indiana. We were in Indiana were there almost every day.
in Port Byron, New York, in for five years, and during that Being around all the Veterans, I
I the Finger Lakes region. My time, my mother had my three was brought up thinking that it
parents were Parl and Dorothy sisters, Carol in 1956, Debbie in was a given that, when you got
Sherman. Shortly after I was 1957, and Allison in 1958. In 1960, out of high school, and if you
born, my father was diagnosed we moved back to upstate New were not going to college, you
with ALS, and he died at the very York. should go into the service. I left
young age of 25, ten days before for Basic Training in the Army
my second birthday. When we first moved back, my three days after I graduated from
parents rented a large old house high school,
In 1956, my mother remarried in Seneca Castle. The house
a wonderful man who accepted was built around 1825, and I I went to Fort Jackson, South
me as his own, and we moved to was 100% convinced that it was Carolina for Basic and Fort
Indiana. As my stepfather had haunted! That old house made Leonard Wood in Missouri for
been a fireman in the Air Force, all kinds of noises. When I got AIT, where I received training
he got a job on an Air Force Base home from school, and nobody on operating quarry equipment,
34 Amarillo Senior Link
