Was my granddaddy. They called him Red because of his temper (and his hair). He grew up in a little town in western Iowa called Moorhead. Amos was 18 years old when he and his identical twin brother, Orrin, enlisted in the USMC and shipped out to France in 1918.

           Amos was very serious while his brother was a hellion. Orrin would get a little bit wild and the MP's would lock him up in the stockade. Amos would be on guard duty and he would switch places with Orrin who would then go out and get in trouble all over again. The MP's were fairly astonished when they hauled Orrin back to the stockade and saw Amos there!

          Amos went on to go to Drake University in Des Moines after the war. His old yearbooks had check marks next to photos of almost every pretty woman in his class. It took me years to figure out what that meant!

          My gramps became a schoolteacher, then a small town principal in Manning, Iowa. In 1942 he was promoted to principal in a small town west of Des Moines called Valley Junction. "Red" Lee had a reputation for tracking down truants out at the gravel pits and hauling them back by their ears. He disdained the hot rodders who revved their engines in the high school parking lot. The Raccoon River was nearby and years later one of his former students wrote some best selling novels about the Principal Enos Lamont and the wild kids of Raccoon Forks High School. Kids in hot rod jalopies pursued by the angry red-headed principal. This fellow Felson sold millions of copies of the books. Years later I asked my grandpa what he thought of those books? He said he had never heard of them!

         They made Amos retire at age 65 back in 1964. Boy, did that make him mad! We used to hang out in his basement office. One time I found a great big box in his desk. The box was full of balloons but they were the strangest balloons I ever saw. They were called Sheik Condoms. There must have been over 100 of them! Fortunately, we didn't inflate them and run upstairs to show our "balloons" to the grown-ups!

          I went off to boarding school in 1969. This marked the beginning of a wonderful correspondence with Amos until he died at the age of 96. I treasure those letters! I saved every single one.