This biography isn't about
'pride'....but it's about who I am and where I come from....the good,
the bad, and the embarrassing, but it's who I am.
This is my mother and
father. My mother was pregnant with me in this picture. I was born 29 days
later.
My mother and father.
May they both rest in
peace.
Mom died March 17, 2005.
I guess I should start
where "I" started.....I was born in the small town of Elkton, Maryland in
1956....the first of three children that were to be born of Robert and Ethel. In this black and white photo my mom is eight months pregnant with
me. I was to be born one month and two days later. She was celebrating her
birthday. My father's nick-name was Skippy. My name was Cathy....no Catherine or Kathleen....just
the nick-name Cathy. There were
several generations of girls with the middle name of Frances. Anyway, the
name 'Cathy' came from my mom's first doll...she had named it Cathy.
When I was born, she gave me that name. Through the years I acquired some
nick-names....mom-mom called me Katrina, Miss Bones (because I was so
skinny),
and others called me Catt. The name Catt has stuck with me all of my life.
On my mother's side of the family we are
Cherokee....from Bladen County North
Carolina. We're from a blue-eyed
band of Cherokee with lighter skin, but boy can we tan!
My great-great grandfather had to change his name in order to give his family a
surname when he married.
My daddy's side of the
family.....I come from a long line of wife-beaters, drug addicts, alcoholics, and
boot-leggers. This was the more 'interesting' side of
my family. My father was shot and killed while boot-legging whiskey, in
Edgewood, Maryland.....I was five years old. He was known as 'The North
East Bandit' .He was buried in an unmarked grave in North East,
Maryland.
So, I guess my mom married the 'bad boy'....much to the horror of her
family.
Three weeks before my
father was killed my parents had celebrated their wedding anniversary. I
don't know which wedding anniversary they were celebrating...there are
conflicting stories and dates and my mom or her side of the family do not talk
about anything. Anyway, my father gave my mom a
little red and white music / sewing box. Ironically, it played the tune
"The Merry Widow Waltz". I have that little sewing box
in my possession and I treasure
it.
I was very, very close to
my father's side of the family....in spite of their 'colorful'
background, they were the most loving people towards me that I knew. Mom-mom
taught me so much, in between my hospital stays. I will go into more of that in
another section of this site. Mom-mom used to tell me how she got through the 'prohibition' days.....she would drink pure vanilla extract, as a way
of getting her 'alcohol'. I loved her stories of her wild youth and
all the things she did...how she did them. You couldn't drag anything out of my
mom's side of the family....they kept things to themselves and will go to the
grave with their secrets.
This
is a picture of my 'mom-mom'....my favorite person in the world while growing
up.
I don't need to go into the
birth defect on this page....so I won't. There are other sections of my
site that explain all of that. But I lived at the Johns Hopkins Children's
Hospital for the biggest part of the first five years of my life. No bonding
time with the family...and definitely not with my mother.
My mother re-married when I
was going on eight years old, to a man only eleven years older than me. My
brother Alan was five years old at this time and my parents immediately sent him
off to a boy's school...Milton Hershey School For
Boys. Back then they only allowed boys to live there...now it's totally
different. He spent the next eleven
years of his life there, coming home only three times a year. I was very close
to my brother. He wanted nothing more than to get to come home and live with us,
but my parents wouldn't let him. After four years of marriage they adopted a
little four month old girl....the 'princess' of the family. This really confused my brother and I can understand
why. I was very close to my sister Cindy...we were only 14 months apart in
age.
I spent nine years of my
life living in Perryville, Maryland with some of the most cruel children you
could ever imagine. The world was different back then, but the scars I have will
last for a lifetime. I went to Perryville
High School from the seventh grade to the tenth grade. I had some wonderful
friends from there, but not many. Most of the kids were not nice to me at
all....or they ignored me. Between the hell I went through at home, on a daily
basis, and what it was like in school, I was not a happy kid. The last two years of high school were spent in other
schools, and the children were totally different. They made my last two years of
school my very best. I graduated from Rising Sun High School in
1975.
Two
weeks after graduation I married John. That marriage lasted only a year. We never had
any children together. But John was my first real boyfriend and met when I
was 16 years old. We married when I was 19 years old. We were really good
friends and should not have married, but he was a very nice guy...do anything
for anyone and everyone liked him. We were just too young.
I love music.....I play the
organ and piano, and I really love the Hammond
B-3 organ with a Leslie speaker. And sing, sing, sing....I love to sing. I haven't played much
in the way of musical instruments for awhile, but the voice is always in shape.
I used to be in bands off and on through the years, and I really enjoyed that. I
can sing a lot of different songs, and can sound like Stevie Nicks.....my
favorite female singer.
I love
documentaries and biographies. I love to learn things that I'm interested in and
I stay busy doing something all the time. I like movies that surprise me, not
predictable 'fish out of water' movies and slap stick. My mind needs
more stimulation than that....like anything that John Malcovich does is
stimulating to me! He's among my favorite actors. I am also a big fan of Tommy
Lee Jones, Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, Rodney Grant
(favorite Native American actor), Vincent
Spano, and Christopher Walken....to name just a few.
I am a Ford girl to the
bone....I love Mustangs and a
Ford Galaxy 500. I recently met a woman who has
one....the Galaxy 500. I have some mechanics in the family and learned to love a
Ford early on....you just can't kill the things. I have a 1986 Ford
Taurus, and
no one can take it from me....it still runs great and I love my car....yes, I
have hand-controls.
I don't drink that very often
at all....just a few times a year...I don't get drunk, (well...not any
more....I out-grew that stuff) but when I do have a
drink, it HAS to be Jack Daniels, straight, with a little water to chase. Never
got the taste for beer and I'm allergic to wine. And I'm not one for the mixed
drinks. And I do not smoke cigarettes or use recreational drugs....neither does
my husband.
I am totally into the space
program....NASA...I have to watch every shuttle launch and enjoy watching
different things on the internet...like live space cams, or different live cams
at NASA. I follow the space program pretty well and visited NASA in Florida
several years ago. I get choked up and teary eyed with every launch and every
landing. And now that I have a computer, I can watch the activities of the space
program on the internet...very exciting to me. As I type this I am watching
another documentary on the space program....I am addicted to it.
I also enjoy
anything on The Blue Angels and their F18's and anything on aircraft
carriers, especially my favorite...the USS
Theodore Roosevelt. I
had a brother and he got me interested in things that most girls don't care
for...but they do fascinate me. I even played Combat, pitched knives, and shot
guns when I was growing up. Now I just shoot darts. And I'm good! I use steel
tip darts, heavy gram. I also love the Baltimore Orioles and Cal Ripken. I
really hate to see him retire.
I really enjoy writing and
reading. I used to write poems, but I was very discouraged about writing poems
when my poetry book was stolen by a guy I used to make stage clothes for. He
really liked a few of my poems and wanted to buy them as lyrics for his songs. I
refused. He came over one day to pick up a pair of leather pants I had mended for
him and my poetry book disappeared....never to be seen again. I never saw or
heard from him again, either. So, I haven't really had my heart into writing
poetry. But I do love to write things....short stories, anything like
that. I do write poetry sometimes, just not as often as I used to. I also enjoy oil painting and crocheting and other 'artistic'
things.
I am currently writing a
book. I have kept journals since I was eleven years old and I still write in one
every day. I want the world to know that the thing with my legs has been the
least of my problems.....the very least. This time it's my turn.....I have a
story to tell....and I'm going to tell it!
My husband Les and I were
married on March 15, 1986 and live in
South Carolina in a wonderful older home. We live about 25 minutes from the
North Carolina mountains. We're right up the road from where they filmed movies
such as Last Of The Mohicans and
Dirty Dancing. They were filmed in an area
called Lake Lure and Chimney
Rock. We
love to drive up there quite often and get some BBQ....best you ever put in your
mouth. A lot of movies are filmed in this area, and if you see any of
them, you'll see the beauty that surrounds my area.
As I can think of things
that might be of interest to you I'll include it on this page, but this will
give you a beginning of who I am.
Many special thanks to
Rob Malt for helping me to find some of the website links.
