An introduction

This is a picture of my wife and I with Jim Howell the artist who painted the portrait shown on my Blog Site. Taken in 1978 while with Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey Circus. My Great Grandfather Hiram Orton took a small circus out of Portage, Wis. in 1853 and my family having remained in the circus business for a century and a half accounts for the thousands of pictures I own and also entitles me to have an opinion on the subject. Now in retirement, one day my wife decided to buy a new computer and handed the old one down to me, my son Shannon who works for Brighthouse, hooked the thing up and it sat on a table in my room for several months until I noticed my grandson Pat ( age 8) playing a game on the thing and I asked him to show me how he did that and rest is history. I started out sending a few pictures to friends unaware of the "6 Degrees of Separation" scenario that might develop and it got out of hand and before I knew it I had over 200 people on my list including two in Germany, three in England and even one in Ireland. Finally I was shut down by AOL who suspected I was running some sort of commercial enterprise and in fact to this day I can only eMail one person at a time. Shannon came up with this Blog Site which I still can't quite understand but I do the best I can. The opinions offered are not "the word as handed down by God unto Moses" but a very close second. Shannon told me that this method of communication would bring about lively debate. Buckles