When I was a teen, my family moved into a different neighborhood. I believe our house had been vacant for a while because they were a few little boys. They climbed the trees there as if they lives there. I believe that was the first time that I realized that I enjoyed hanging out with kids. I ran around with those little guys, climbed trees with the little guys and they even came over and asked for me at my door. I never went anywhere but my front yard with them but we enjoyed our time together. It’s a time I’ll never forget.

Like many teens, I began working in a fast food restaurant and when I graduated high school at 17, I was promoted to manager of the eating place I had worked at for the last couple of years. By that time, I was dating the girl who would become my wife at 19 . At 22, fascinated by the growing world of electronics, I enrolled in a Dallas/Ft Worth A&M extension school to train to be a technician.

A year into my education, we moved to College Station where I continued my schooling for only a few months. My wife at that time and I were soon to be parents and money took priority. I was offered a management position at the bowling center I worked in as a technician and at age 25, I became a father. We had taken some wrong turns in our teens and, being teens in the 70s, I don’t think I need to elaborate much. I was quite an idiot then, but I do consider myself the most responsible idiot I knew.

Fatherhood changed my lifestyle, however, as I took that role very seriously. I was working my way out of the drinking and drug world and my wife, although being very responsible while breastfeeding our son, was working her way back into that world. I became a single dad when my son was a year and a half old. That was an incredible time in my life. Hard yeah, but incredible, nonetheless. I had a son!

My love for children in general had not diminished in any way. At age 27, I began to work with elementary kids in a church environment. It wasn’t long before I figured out that I could spend my life doing this. I got remarried and for the next several years, my second (and present) wife and I raised her three young children and my one, while I was still very active with kids on Sundays. Working with my own kids and those at church was one of the most unbelievable challenges and blessings of my life. At home, we were as busy as most parents were in that day, running our four children to sports activities, school and an occasional vacation. Much of what we did at church was prewritten stage programs made up of skits, fun, teaching and small groups.

I almost never ask why things happens. I just try to make the best of things and follow where things take me. About roughly 25 years into my work with kids, an amazing thing happened for me. Something I had never expected nor planned. I was asked to write stage programs for K-5th summer camps! 5 days, 5 programs. We called it DOG (Depend on God) camp. My wife had done an amazing job rescuing dogs for several years by then. Seeing all those different dogs come through my house helped me see that there were some similarities between hanging out with kids and hanging out with dogs. I thought, “What if I could merge the two worlds”? I thought that it was going to be incredibly difficult, but I sat down and started writing and it just flowed. It felt like God had been planting some seeds in me all of my life and they were beginning to grow!

Dressed as dogs walking on two feet, the stage stories I wrote over the next few years were acted out by amazing volunteer teens and 20-somethings for many audiences of children. The stories were based on several dogs’ lives. Rocky, Dottie, and Molly were only a few.

At one point, I examined all of the years of playscripts and got excited and touched by it all over again. I wondered, “Could I turn these into a book or two that would encourage families and kids to interact over the virtues that inspired these pages?” Like most things that I’ve done in my life, I won’t be successful if I never try. That’s what brought about “ROCKY’S FOREVER HOME”.