Page 22 - Been There… Done That!

Gary Graham
tough. He also taught me that I needed to develop plenty of hustle and go out and get what I want. At that point, many people didn’t know what they wanted because the times were changing so fast. Wounded in World War II during the fighting, Carney landed in the hospital and while recovering started thinking of ways to make money so he would have something in his pocket when he came home. He began buying bicycles and renting them to soldiers on leave in Paris.
At his core, he was a gambler and for a while he did well for himself playing dice and poker, once winning a ranch in Bandera, Texas and scoring a $40,000 jackpot in Las Vegas. Yet like the typical tale of the gambling man, my step-dad eventually lost it all. Toward the end, we didn’t realize what was going on until the millions he once had were just gone and it was likely that things got that wrong because he was suffering some type of dementia. In that state, he was still engaging in high-stakes poker games with what I would label low-stakes knowledge.
I have mixed feelings about him because he was tough on my mom. And in that situation, how could I choose sides? With my eyes always looking for something better, as well as a way to escape from my Lake Ozark environment, I enlisted in the Navy when I turned 17 to get away from it all. That way I didn’t have to choose sides and they had to work it out for themselves. And I learned somewhere along the line that I have to depend upon myself and “Whatever Will Be Will Be.” I still have Carney’s Purple Heart and the flag from his coffin when he was buried and I know to
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