February 3rd - Happy Birthday to Town Clerk Cindy Nelson and to my father Jacob Henry Halterman and Tribute

Happy Birthday to my dad Jacob Henry Halterman - Jake - who was born on this day in 1917. A WWII and Korean War vet, my dad grew up in an Ozarks family of 22 kids, with a father who ran with Jesse and Frank James and the Sheldon Boys of Chicago. He was raised from age 7 on in an IOOF orphanage when his father died from being pushed off a roof in a fight. He lied about his age to join the Navy at age 17. He dug towns out of the mud in the 1927 Missouri flood. He won the Lady Bird Johnson award for his work restoring and maintaining the freeway grounds through Balboa Park, and taught horticulture at Pierce College even though he never even graduated from high school. He was a botanist, a geologist, a rockhound, a jeweler, a gardener and landscape designer par extrodinaire and had four marriages and seven daughters and an only son, my brother James Luther Halterman. My dad taught me to love the earth, the outdoors, hiking, backpacking, plants, animals and rocks and the Tufa Towers of Mono Lake. He died at 86 and would have been 97 today.