Sometime in 2007, my GP at Group Health Cooperative told me I had high blood pressure. I concluded I would die soon from a stroke or something.
One of the things I wanted to do before I died was tell my sons, JD and Chad, about my life before they were born.
I knew virtually nothing about my own father’s life other than the basics – Farm boy, WWI veteran, WSU graduate, Standard Oil employee in Culver City, California and gas station man in West Seattle when I was born in 1943.
I also wanted to tell my sons that life does not proceed in a linear, predetermined fashion. Life, at least mine, is made up of a series of coincidences, guesses and lucky moves.
Then, one day, this little ditty came into my head – “Dig that man with the crazy tan; he’s our Dan from the Irish clan.” It was my campaign slogan for President of my 8th grade class.
With that ditty in my head, I went down to my basement and started writing my memoirs. They turned out to be a series of vignettes in somewhat chronological order so I called them “Portions.”
I stopped writing my memoirs about a year later in 2008. I’m not sure why. Maybe I realized I wasn’t going to die, at least not yet.. Nevertheless, this memoir covers the time when I started St. Anne’s Parish school in 1950 to my return from the Soviet Union in 1977.
Hope you enjoy some of the stories.
— Dan Leahy
November, 2022
p.s. Here is a link to a pdf of Portions for download.
