Why

was born in an old, wooden, two-story hospital in Carrollton, Georgia, in 1949. Some years later it burned to the ground. For the first eleven years of my life, I lived in Bremen, Georgia. I was the oldest child of Alvin and Doris Patterson. Dad and Mother got married soon after Dad returned from Europe in 1946, where he’d served as a .30 machine gunner in the Tenth Mountain Division during World War ll. He was involved in three major battles and received a Presidential Unit Citation and a ...