This is my story about growing up in the Midwest during World War II. A story during the greatest era ever, when men and women made the ultimate sacrifices of all time. This is a story about how an uneducated high school drop-out elevated himself from a Common Labor to a Design Engineer, learned to fly an airplane and obtaining a flight instrument rating. A story of Travels to Europe, our favorite being Normandy, France, and Paris. I would like to share my tribulations with anyone interested in life growing up during the 1940s and 1950s. You can do anything that you want in life if you just put your mind to it!I have always been a perfectionist, which caused me great difficulty in writing my memoir. At first, I struggled with putting down my memories because I felt that my words were not good enough for anyone to read without being turned off. After several weeks of writing, I decided that I should not write to perfection. I should just put in words the failures that I had endured in my life and what I had actually accomplished. It was very easy to determine my failures because I had many. But I had also accomplished much more in life than I had ever dreamed that I would. The thing that motivated me the most in writing my memoir was that I did not want to lose the memory of my life history. I felt that while growing older I would begin to lose the memory of all the happy times that had happened during my lifetime. I also wanted to document everything that I could think of to share my entire life with my wife Mary, my sisters, my children, and step-children. During the process of my writings, I learned a lot about myself. As I proceeded writing chapter by chapter, I began to realize that my life was full of sorrow and happiness. I had forgotten many things that had happened during my lifetime until I wrote down my memories on paper. I would like to thank my wife, Mary, for her encouragement and the many hours that she spent in editing and correcting the English usage and punctuation. I would usually write a chapter and then have Mary read it and give me the feedback that I needed to make it more legible. I lost track of how long it took for me to write my memoir, but I know that it was over a period of several months. Some days I would spend all day writing; but then at times, I would go for a week or more without doing anything. I would like to share my tribulations with anyone interested in life growing up during the 1940s and 1950s.