Seven things you probably don't know ...

I'm not entirely sure that I understand this concept, but I'm sure Meredith Heywood, prominent Seagrove, N.C., potter, will explain this to me in a comment. Meredith has asked several of us to post on our blogs seven things that people who usually read our blogs are unlikely to know about us. So, here goes ...

1) I am descended on one side of my family from a Portuguese barber. My great-grandfather, Antone S. Andrews (top photo, at left, in his barber shop), came to this country from the Azores islands in the late 19th century. He settled on the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard with his Azorean wife, whom he met in this country. His barber shop was on Main Street in Vineyard Haven, which many years later became my hometown when Antone's granddaughter, Lucille, gave birth to me.

2) The first time I saw my mother cry was when we were returning to Martha's Vineyard from a rare trip to Boston and we missed the last ferry to the island. We were forced to stay overnight on the mainland, in the Hilltop House inn in Falmouth (now home of the Woods Hole Research Center). There my youngest brother, Tom, fell into the toilet. I'm the tall one without the hood in the photo above, taken the next morning. Tom, the baby of the family, is in my shadow, but appears to be wearing dry pants. The other two are brother Roger and sister Jeanne.

3) Dee and I have a son, Marcus, also a native of Martha's Vineyard, who lives with his wife Anastasia Pantelias in Seattle. From the time we lived on the Vineyard and later in New Mexico, Marcus was an outdoors kid. Now he and Anastasia are backcountry skiers and climbers most of the year. Both are involved in search-and-rescue. When he is not running computer systems, Marcus sometimes jumps out of helicopters (once they're on the ground) in pursuit of lost and distressed skiers, hikers, BASE-jumpers and others in trouble in the mountains. That's Marcus in the bottom photo.

4) When I was 13, I caddied at Mink Meadows Golf Club for E.Y. "Yip" Harburg, the man who wrote "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." He was a poor tipper.

5) Dee and I were married in 1970 on the Vineyard, then drove across the country in a 1956 baby blue Ford station wagon, in which we slept on a 3/4-width mattress. We drove north of Lake Superior in Canada, down into Minnesota, across the west (rodeo in Rapid City!) and into San Francisco. We settled in Oakland for several months, ran out of money, then fled home via the southern route to Massachusetts. I am still looking for a photo of that car.

6) I once beat a New Mexico U.S. congressman in a sled-dog race in the Jemez Mountains outside Los Alamos. The fact that he was coming off open-heart surgery had no bearing on the outcome of the race.

7) As features editor of The New Mexican newspaper in Santa Fe, I was a member of the New Mexico State Champion Trivial Pursuit team in 1985. Somewhere, I still have the gold-plated game token we won.