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A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

work anyway.” He said that he supposed I was right, but that he had reason to sympathize with me Tor
the years I had spent with her.

1 hope that Ruth lives long enough to get a chance to read this book, as I want her to be aware that my
feelings haven’t changed since I fell out with her about 1960, when we started the divorce proceedings.

Another thing that I did which was greatly to my benefit, and to a surprising degree, was that as soon as
the divorce procedure began 1 borrowed all the money I could borrow from the banks, from my uncle
Ollie, and from my uncle Henry, and made down payments on all of the farms that I could find in
Columbia and Suwannee Counties, by making as small a cash down payment as I could get by with, and
having a mortgage on each ofthe farms as large as I could. In the final property settlement, it turned out
that none of these farms would have been suitable for Ruth to get in the settlement, because she could
not possibly make the required payments on them. The beautiful thing about that is that within 2 years of
the time our divorce was final, I sold each of those farms for as much as twice what 1 had paid for it, and
in some cases 3 times what I had paid for it. So, in the final analysis, she and her actions were
responsible for my financial well being within just a few years of our divorce.

Wife No. 2

My second wife, Julie Rish, and I were married in 1965, and she was an entirely different type of person
from what Ruth had been. Julie had graduated with a teaching degree from Texas Christian University,
in Fort Worth, Texas, and had come to Lake City and taken a job as a Junior High English teacher. And
since we were teaching at the same school 1 came to know her through attendance at faculty meetings.
Both the Junior High and the High School were all located on the same campus, and the High School
Band had quite a number of Junior High students in it also, some of whom were my very best players at
the time. Julie was a very honest and likable person, and a clean type of person. Our eventual separation
I suppose was probably caused by the fact that she and 1 had such different views and attitudes toward
the way the world worked, and we stayed in disagreement a lot of the time about matters that people
should be able to agree on.

The terms of our divorce were amicably worked out without any enmity or bitterness between us. I still
like and respect Julie.

Julie and I had first agreed that we would try to have 4 children, and in 1967 our daughter Suzanne was
born, and she was indeed a treasure. We both just adored her, and she was a fun little girl to have around
the house.

Suzanne was born on October 5, 1967. We had no children bom during 1968, but along came Brad on
,h
May 20 of 1969, some 19 months after Suzanne had been born.
We almost lost Brad, because when he was bom the front of his stomach was not completely closed, and
his intestines were not enclosed, and were visible to look at him. We did not think he would survive, but
Dr. Barney MacRae had him loaded on an ambulance and taken to Hope Haven Hospital in Jacksonville
(Hope Haven later became DuPont Hospital), and I followed along behind the ambulance in my car on
the way to the hospital which was on the east side of Jacksonville.

A young doctor by the name of Warner Webb took over Brad’s case, and closed the front of his stomach
by using over 100 sutures. He told me that he could not guarantee that Brad would survive, and that the
odds were that he would not, because of lesions that he would have on some of his intestines, and they
may not work properly. He kept him in the hospital for about a week, and allowed us to bring him home.

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