The truth is a lot more personal. I spent much of my childhood on a remote ranch in Northern New Mexico, settled by my grandfather, a teacher and newspaper publisher, who homesteaded there a dozen years before statehood.  The town he founded sat astride the Santa Fe Trail that stretched east toward Amarillo and west toward Tucumcari. By 1926 that trail had been transformed into the original roadbed of Route 66, and the great westward migration driven by the Dustbowl of the 30s passed by his front door.  Grandfather loved the plays of Shakespeare so he named the town "Bard City."  

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My father was born there.  He left for World War II from Bard, but came home to Santa Fe four years later, broken by the Bataan Death March and his years in POW camps.  He married a WAC nurse in the Army hospital. I was born in Santa Fe, but lived for long stretches in Bard, where my grandfather became my first and greatest teacher. Just the two of us, surrounded by red dirt and mesquite as far as the eye could see. An old bachelor, a young boy, and a lot of books.  

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Our four-room adobe house had neither running water nor indoor plumbing. It would be thought by today's standards to be almighty primitive.  But it was there I learned to love learning, and literature, and history, and the classics, and to work hard and not count the hours. It was a 19th Century childhood.  

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Bard is gone today, blown away by time and the ceaseless high desert winds. Our house has fallen into ruin.  Route 66 is again a dirt track. No one lives in Bard now, even though there's a Bard exit off Interstate 40.  That and the name of my consulting practice are all that remain to honor the place that made me.  

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