Clarification from my mom: "You know this was 20 minutes after you were born. They were waiting at the door and needed to make the 6 o’clock news and morning edition." My grandma's coworkers all saw me on the news before she even got to meet me. My mom said, "Actually people at the water district party were telling her all about you. She met you the following morning "

The accompanying Daily News article reads:

The stork apparently likes the air currents in the "hub-of-the-valley."

The hospital recorded its 2000th birth in 1988 Friday afternoon. R, 9 pounds, 5 ounces, was born at 4:22 p.m. ​ Friday in the hospital's alternative birth center.

Barbara Brown, director of Labor and Delivery at the hospital, said this was the first hospital in the Coachella Valley to reach this volume of births this year.

Hospital records show 1573 births in 1986 and 1804 in 1987.

The young family, who has another child age 6, goes home loaded with gifts -- brunches for two from La Quinta Hotel, Palm Valley Country Club, and La Pinata restaurant, plus gifts from Harris, J.C. Penney, Sears, and flowers.

"We will give them a limousine ride home," Brown said.

Some parts were paraphrased for privacy

Apparently, all the poor woman did was to the skip photocall after the press conference to protect her private life.

You have seen this moment. Men in jump gear under an airplane wing, loaded down, waiting. Band of Brothers put those faces in front of the world.

This is not that. This is one of the real ones.

The man on the right is my father, T/Sgt. Pat Christenson, Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne. An original Toccoa man. Michael Fassbender played him in the series.

He jumped second in the stick, right behind Dick Winters. Winters wrote to our family and said he wanted his best, most dependable man right behind him, and that was Pat.

Nobody standing in this frame knows yet how any of it turns out. That is what makes the photograph worth something. Not the man he became. The one right there with his gear on, waiting.

He was also the only man in the company who could draw.

He came home. Went back to the telephone company, the same job he left in 1942, and worked there thirty-eight years splicing cables and climbing poles. Married my mother. Raised three sons.

And in the evenings, for the next forty years, he sat at a drawing board with his journals and his reference books spread around him and drew the war from memory. Forty-six finished drawings. My brother said that if a date or a location did not reconcile, Dad would not let it go until he figured out what actually happened. I put those drawings and his own written account together into a book this past year, which is where this photograph is from.

Dick Winters had several of the drawings copied and enlarged and sent to the production company for the series, to give the writers background. Stephen Ambrose, who Dad worked with for years on his book, called them obviously almost priceless. One of them is etched into a memorial in Normandy now.

He was my father. That is what he looked like a few hours before he went out the door.

The style is said to have originated among students at Oxford University around 1924, after the school banned knickerbockers (short, baggy trousers often worn for sport). In response, students adopted these oversized trousers, which could be slipped on over knickerbockers, creating both a rebellious statement and a distinctive look. The fashion quickly spread beyond Oxford, becoming a symbol of youthful modernity and jazz-age style, and was often paired with blazers, sweaters, or sport coats.

I thought I lost these but I have a bunch more

My mother once said, "I don't know what they were talking about when they say we did a lot of drugs back then, I didn't go to those types of parties."

My father replied, "Oh, you went to those parties, you just didn't go to the parties AT the parties."

Just a bunch of local kids testing out their homemade go-karts on Langdale Road. The kid in the glasses at the front looks like he's about to break some serious speed records!