05/25/2026
Memorial Day is more than a holiday. It is a reminder that the freedoms we enjoy every day—the freedom to write to our friends, farm our land, build businesses, and form lifelong partnerships—were secured through sacrifice.
Some may wonder why I would begin another career, this winery, after working a full career. My father taught me a lesson that answered what question long ago. He would say, “Waste not, want not.” To him, that did not only apply to material things—it applied to time as well. Every day mattered.
The farm my grandfather worked had been taken during the Great Depression, and the family became sharecroppers. My grandparents and all ten children worked the land together and lived in a two room cabin. The boys often shared the few clothes they owned, taking turns wearing them. At times, they worked the fields in nothing more than their nightshirts. So when the opportunity came to earn their own clothes, shoes, and a future, it was an easy decision for my father and one of his older brothers.
On September 29, 1942, at just 17 years old, my father enlisted in the Marines. By December of that year, he found himself in a place far removed from the fields of home—the Pacific Theater, with shoes of his own. The entire 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing had deployed to Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands to support the fierce Allied offensive against Japan.
Experiences like that cannot truly be written. They can only be seen through the eyes of a 17-year-old farm boy suddenly standing in a foreign land surrounded by war, trying to decide if the shoes were worth it.
I often think about how different life was for me at 17. In 1974, I was listening to Steve Miller Band, Bob Dylan, and Redbone. Eric Clapton’s album 461 Ocean Boulevard played on repeat. None of it compared to what my father faced at the same age—boots on the ground in a distant land, surrounded by uncertainty, loss, and duty.
I never truly understood what my father had endured during the war or throughout the thirty years that followed, in Korea, Vietnam, and Guantanamo Bay. I did not know about the friends he lost in combat, the commanders he respected, the lives he changed at Parris Island, or how deeply the war changed the course of his life forever.
After retiring in 1972, my father returned to farming. He lived simply and quietly. I never asked him what the war had been like. Part of me was afraid to know.
Today, on Memorial Day, I remember not only my father for he service, but more importantly, all those who never came home and all those forever changed by the mission of freedom.
To the fallen, and to the memories they left behind, I salute you.
