My father and mother Vernon Roland and Doris Cox, were children of the Great Depression. Born into poverty, Vernon ran away from home at twelve and joined the hundreds of thousands of children during the Depression who stole rides on freight train boxcars, lived in hobo jungles and survived through cunning and crime. By the time he was eighteen, Vernon had been in a Texas reformatory and had served a two-year adult sentence at the notorious Eastham Prison Farm of Huntsville State Prison.

Also born into poverty and the child of a broken home, Doris was deeply religious and deeply in love with Vernon. In 1940, they eloped by traveling to Colorado on a freight train and married at eighteen, living in an environment where it was not rational to have children. But theirs was not a rational romance.

Children of the Wayward Wind tells my story as one of the five children they brought into their chaotic world—how we five children lived and survived the wild antics of our father Vernon. And how our mother Doris kept the family together through all of the chaos, instilling in us a strong sense of pride, resiliency, and moral and ethical behavior.

Vernon's tragic death in 1956 left our family penniless, with an uncertain future. This story ends in 1960 when I was seventeen, as I graduated from Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach, California on the precipice of a successful adult life, thanks to my mother and despite my father. My graduation speech stressed the importance of ethics and morality for the truly educated person.