Ray and I go back to 1961 and 8th grade at Palm Springs Junior High. We started hanging out together in high school when we both delivered the Miami Herald in the early morning. We double and triple dated young ladies in our senior year and we both went to Miami-Dade Junior College while both of us worked at Sears, Roebuck & Company at Northside Shopping Center in 1965/1966. The draft board was after both of us and he joined the Navy a couple of months before I went in the USCG in mid-1966. Ray became a hospital corpsman in the Navy and we met in New York when he was stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Hospital in New Hampshire and I was stationed at the Coast Guard Yard in Maryland. He deployed to a Marine Corps unit in Vietnam in October 1967 and was seriously wounded by a mortar shell exploding near him shortly after he arrived in-country. He was medically retired from the Navy after spending months in Navy hospitals in Japan and Jacksonville, Florida.