I bought my 1st guitar for 25 cents a week ....

I was fifteen and had a dream ... I wanted to  learn to play guitar so badly I could almost taste it.  So, I went down to the local "Western Auto" store and layed away a gorgeous shiny black guitar and paid 25 cents a week on it.  I think Western Auto must have called my parents after a few months because on Christmas Day 1965, it was sitting under the Christmas tree.

All my life I have always had a guitar. In 2001 I moved back to NY from Idaho to visit a friend of 35 years who was dying.  She was a doctor ... "Doc" to her friends.   I ended up just staying right in the hospital for the next year 24/7 because she was so sick.  Hospitals are to understaffed to really take care of people who are long term critically ill. I slept in chairs, the floor ... where ever I could.   I had my guitar and that was it.  I would play for Doc and other patients on the floor.  That was all I could do to ease their suffering a little.

 Doc went into a coma during the last 3 months.  I still played because I'm sure coma patients can hear us.  A new television show came on PAX TV while I was staying there with Billy Ray Cyrus playing Dr. Clint 'Doc' Cassidy, an old fashion country doctor just like Doc.  I cried through many an episode!  But Billy Ray .... you helped save my sanity ... thank you.  It was a great show.

After Doc died, I was pretty much traumatized by the past year and jobless so I had to sell my beautifull Gibson.  I have not recuperated enough financially yet to buy another nice guitar yet.  I never played an Epiphone but I think I hear her calling my name lol!