The Rangity Tango Kids

The Rangity Tango Kids is my first memoir about my family and growing up on a fifth-generation farm in rural California. Writing this book was truly a labor of love, as my inspiration to write the book came from losing my from a brain tumor when she was 70. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, a time and a place that is rapidly disappearing. I wanted to save my family's traditions and unique lifestyle to pass on to my nieces and nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews, as they didn't grow up on the farm working in the fields alongside Dad and Grandpa like I did, from the time I was 10 years old. I was the oldest of 17 grandkids, and we all grew up together playing and working on the farm. One of my Dad's workers said we ran around the farm like a bunch of orangutans and he nicknamed us the Rangity Tango Kids. We were surrounded by a large loving and supportive family that stuck together and took care of each other no matter what. We hunted the eggs, fed the chickens, and milked the cow, butchered pigs, drove trucks, tractors, and harvesters. We hunted and fished and ate everything we killed, except the varmints that ate Dad's crops. We went to school in a one-room school house in the corner of Grandpa's field, 25 kids in grades one through eight with one teacher. We learned to water-ski in the canal being pulled behind the pickup. Most of all, I wanted to thank my mother and father and my grandparents for a wonderful life.