My name is Richard Stephen Curtis, and I was born on Christmas Day in the middle of World War II, arriving just in time for lunch and haven’t missed a meal since.  

Me, at 6 months, with my mother on my grandmother’s front porch swing

When I was 6 months old and swinging on the front porch with my mother, Doris Curtis, at my grandmother’s house in Petersburg, Virginia, my father Major Ben Curtis was on the beach at Normandy with the 3rd Army on his way into occupied France. My father was brave but then so was my mother. It was a hard time for both.

Me with my mother in my grandmother’s yard and my dad taken the day the allies liberated Paris

Two months later I had graduated to digging holes in my grandmother’s back yard, and my father, now Lt. Col. Curtis, was commanding the 500th Quartermaster Battalion, supplying Patton’s armored divisions with gasoline, ultimately running the world’s largest gas station. While I was playing in the dirt, he was liberating Paris on August 25, 1944. That night, after bumping up the steps of the Sacre Coeur in his command car, the Doris II, he and his sergeant drank a liberated bottle of French champagne and watched the moon rise over the City of Light from the highest point in town. 

Me about to cry with a bump on my head

When I was one, Christmas 1944, and feeling sorry for myself because I had had a thump, my dad was in Bastogne with the Third Army fighting for the survival of the free world at the Battle of the Bulge. They won.

My dad at Nuremberg Stadium, May 1945

Six months later, my dad, or Papa as he was called by his grandchildren, was at Nuremberg Stadium in May 1945.  A war weary, tough, but never a rough, man now on a cane presumably from when his next to last command car, the Doris V, was destroyed quite possibly knocking down the gate of a German concentration camp. My dad would never say exactly how, the specifics were hard for him, too real and too close even though removed by time and the Atlantic Ocean. 

He ended the war in Doris VI with 5000 men under his command. He had discarded the cane and came home healthy in body but never fully recovered in mind or spirit, from living day after day with death, and seeing in his own words, “bodies stacked like cord wood along the roadsides.”  He wouldn’t cry but would sit in his soft chair for hours reading books about the war and not speaking.  I do remember him crying just the one time, however, on the day I drove out of our driveway headed off to college. One more young man gone but not forgotten.

This is meant to be my story, but it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge the greatest generation’s role in my life, men and women like my mother and father, who made it possible for me, for all of us to have a story.   

From 1945 to the present, my life has been pretty much the stuff of my mother and father, if you work hard, you can do well. Our family moved to Louisiana, where my father was a petroleum engineer working in the oil business, and my mother was involved with her friends, her family, and her church. We lived in the country. There were no storm sewers just culverts out front that flowed with water after a rain. I spent my early years with my dog Buff, the world’s ugliest cocker spaniel, at my side.  Money was tight, and Buff came at a low cost. Those were my cowboy years. I was Roy Rogers, and Buff was Pat Brady. I was an only child and Buff was an only dog, and so, it was Buff and me against the world.

Me, at 3 and 1/2 and Buff

Buff and I started school together. I was five and Buff was three. He sat at my feet under my desk until the end of our second year, when he bit our teacher on the ankle and was expelled. But, each day after the bell rang, we would play outside until dinner time and my mother would call me in. Buff lived in the backyard in a house of his own, built by my father, the modest war hero, the soft-hearted destroyer of five command cars, the liberator of cities and of concentration camps. 

When I was about seven, the big weeping willow tree in our back yard was partially uprooted by a windstorm but survived and remained at a 45-degree angle with the horizontal. Buff, a dog who never quite realized his limitations, quickly learned to trot up its back side, with me trailing behind. Our rude wooden tree house above was built by my father, like Buff’s house, and was literally the high point of our daily lives. It was our Sacre Coeur, and, we, Buff and I and our best buddy, Charles Hopper, could see everything that young cowboys needed to see from there. The bad guys were well within range of our bb guns, mostly squirrels and the occasional neighborhood cat. We rarely hit anything and had nothing against the squirrels or the cats, but, when we missed, Buff would often run down his tree and chase them away. It was his yard, and he wanted the neighborhood to know it. 

As the years have gone by, I’ve owned several pure-bred expensive, nice looking, lovable dogs, mostly cockers, but none, in my heart of hearts, have been able to replace my ugly, ankle-biting, tree-climbing, squirrel and cat-chasing yellow pooch. He was worth every penny of the few dollars my mother and father had to put aside to pay for him. He was inexpensive but, never cheap, not to me.  

Shortly after Buff died and was buried at the base of our bent willow tree, our family moved to Houston, where I went to middle and high school and then on to college and to medical school in Dallas, where our first child, our son, Collin, was born. How I got from being Roy Rogers to becoming a doctor is another story entirely and needs a bit more space. It’s recorded in the writing section of this site, and is entitled, The Star and the Streetlamp, and is true, or as close to true, as a fiction writer can manage.   

Our second child, Allison, our daughter, was born during the Vietnam War at the Air Force Academy hospital in Colorado Springs, where I was serving in the US Air Force Medical Corps.       

In the years in between Vietnam and the present, we, my wife, Marty, I, and our two children, have lived off and on in the Colorado Rockies but spent most of our lives in Texas. I received my MD degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and served there as an associate clinical professor of orthopedic surgery for thirty-five years. During that time, I have also been a partner at the W. B. Carrell Orthopedic Clinic in Dallas. I have helped to develop medical instruments for use in scoliosis surgery and hold several US copyrights and patents, two of which have been incorporated into Nike athletic shoe designs. A member of multiple medical societies and hospital staffs, I have also served as a clinical consultant at the Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for children. In addition, I have written widely, medical articles, poetry, short stories, and screenplays. 

I am a son, a husband, a father, and now the grandfather of the two boys whose pictures appear with mine, with spoons hanging from our noses, on the rear cover of my first novel, Once in a Blue Moon. A book written for the young at heart, filled with magical realism, that wants the reader to smile, to think about diversity, and to believe in love. In other words, to plunge headlong into life.

These days, I’m back in the dog business with about a thousand pounds of grand dog, two English Labs, Frank and Otis, and two American Bulldogs, Baxter and Rex.

My four dogs – two English Labs, Frank and Otis, and two American Bulldogs, Baxter and Rex

Like scruffy little Buff, none of them is frightened by the neighborhood animals, squirrels, racoons, armadillos, and cats, even bobcats. And will chase them from their yards, when they deem it necessary.  The only thing they can’t do is to run up the back of a tree.