What "It's in the Blood" is about

	Have you ever wondered why some people seem predisposed 
to be bullies while others seem to be constantly trying to 
promote peace and harmony? Could the differences in the people
we know be Genetics? Environment? Both? There’s no clear-cut 
answer, but after a lifetime of observation, I vote for both.  
	When I was in the fifth grade, a teacher told me that my 
father would be quite displeased with my response to an 
incident on the school ground before classes began. I knew she
was wrong and I told her so. I had seen my father’s response 
to a similar incident, but that  didn’t keep her from imposing 
her idea of justice in the matter. The teacher called me a 
bully and proceeded to administer the punishment prescribed for
such actions in those days. Her actions started a chain of 
events that got the poor hapless kid who started the mess 
whipped three more times and me twice more.  
	It seemed very right to me, that he should receive one 
more  whipping than I did. After all, He was the one who started 
the fight in  the first place. The teacher’s actions were not 
excusable, from my  point of view, because she had not bothered 
to find out who was really  to blame for the confrontation. 
She had seen only the end of the event and jumped to the 
conclusion that I was in the wrong because I was  the victor. 
	Fortunately, the principle of the school was a thinking 
man and he bothered to ask me why I whipped the boy again, each 
time I was punished for fighting. I told him that I didn’t mind 
being punished for  fighting. I knew that it was against the 
rules. I just wanted the person who was fighting with me 
punished as well, but since the teacher had punished only me I 
was going to rebalance the scales of justice until the situation 
was handled as it should have been in the first place.   
	I got one more whipping for that fight, but the boy who 
started the fight in the first place got one as well and that 
ended the incident.  
	My adversary’s name was Bill B----- and we played and 
worked together for the next two years without a cross word 
ever passing  between us. I haven’t seen him in sixty years, but
I still count him  among my best friends. 
	How much of the incident was prompted by environment and  
how much was prompted by genetics I’ll leave the conclusion to 
that  question to conjecture, but I’m absolutely sure that both 
were  involved. 
	It’s in the Blood is my effort at showing the connection  
between genetics and environment. My vehicle of choice is a  
series of events in the lives of a man and a woman and how 
they responded to them.  
	The story starts with their parents to give you a sense 
of where they came from and how they became who they were. 
Then the story follows their entire life from a chance meeting,  
through good and bad times, to the last, reported, incident in
their walk through life together. 
	The short stories of their early years, that are used
were shared  with me by those two wonderful people. They were my 
parents and the  stories of their later years were shared with 
them by me. George and Etter Pickle were not without blemish 
and I have  made on effort to show them as anything but real; 
flaws and all.  
	A high school student recently told me that genetics was 
a boring subject and it probably is when studied in a labratory, 
but if it's the genetivs of real people your studying and you add 
real life situations to the mix as I have done in It’s in the 
Blood the subject can get downright lively.  
	In the pages that follow, you will begin reading an 
adventure like you have never read before. I hope you enjoy 
reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it and somewhere 
along the way I believe you will find that genetics is not
in control of the journey we take through life. It just adds some 
interesting twists along the way making the trip worth taking.