Family of Origin on Conversations with Bob!

It's Conversations with Bob: Up Close and Personal!

For the first time on the web facts will be exposed about Bob and John! Yes, everything you have been desiring to know about Bob and John... right here, right now!

We distort. You deride.

Bob,

I have to begin my story with my family of origin. I could go all the way back to Andrew Shock, born in Germany in 1733 and emigrated to the New World by 1759. He married Margaret and then had a son William Shuck, who married Polly Banta and moved along with the Low Dutch down into Kentucky and purchased land from Squire Boone, Daniel Boone's brother. The Shucks in Henry County Kentucky are very likely distant cousins. I could go into all of that, but suffice it to say that the Shucks have been wandering Presbyterians for many generations.

You can see my family tree here. Maybe we are related? You can read about the Low Dutch here. William and Polly had twenty children. John Shuck (b. 1800) moved the family to Indiana in 1837 and resided in Johnson County. His son John Samuel Shuck (my g-grandfather, fought in the unpleasantness of the 1860s for the Union--7th Indiana, Company E), then became a lawyer and a pioneer, moving west to Minnesota, Nebraska, and finally Kansas where he established Presbyterian churches and edited newspapers. His son, Gordon Shuck, my grandfather, became an electrical engineer and eventually settled in Seattle, teaching at the University of Washington. My mother's side is also full of Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Puritans all the way back to the 1600s when they came over on the Queen Anne.

My father married the boss's daughter 1948. The boss, John Andrews, was head of R&D at Proctor and Gamble in Cincinnati. My father was a chemical engineer. He had a Ph. D. from the University of Washington in Chemistry. My father didn't like the trains in Cincinnati which delayed the afternoon traffic so he moved his bride to Los Angeles and taught for awhile at USC. He fell in love with Montana and moved there and taught from 1951-1956 at the University of Montana in Missoula.

Back to California to teach at Fresno State and finally he decided to go for it.

In 1961, at the age of 43, he quit his teaching job, sired another son, me, and bought a cattle ranch near Winthrop, Washington, along the Methow River. My mother dutifully followed.

My parents, brother and sister, ten and twelve years older than I, respectively, became cowboys and cowgirls. I was a cowbaby.

Shortly after the move to Winthrop my mother got religion. She was raised a Unitarian, but was befriended by a woman by the name of Lola Lufkin and began to attend the local Assembly of God church. Her husband Francis Lufkin was the world's first smoke jumper and the smoke jumping airport abutted my parents' ranch. My dad got in more that one scuffle with the smoke jumpers. It was probably good that my mom and Lola were best friends so my dad and Mr. Lufkin didn't shoot each other.

I went with my mother to every church function. I remember when I was three or four watching her get baptized in Patterson Lake. More on that next time. It is enough to know for now, that my parents are both still living and doing well in Eastern Montana.

From my father I inherit some stubbornness, skepticism regarding any kind of superstition (including religion), and the love of a good joke. From my mother I inherit a faith in mysteries that reason cannot know, kindness toward all people, and a love for the Bible and sauerkraut.