I'm posting this on April 30th, but I'm putting an April 28th date on it, because that was--would have been--Trip Martin's 60th birthday. Do you still say it's so-and-so's birthday if the person is already dead? I'll just say it was the 60th anniversary of Trip's birth. He died in January of 1993, supposedly by shooting himself while lying in bed in his apartment in McGehee, Arkansas, where he'd been employed by the Arkansas Highway Department for about 15 years, after graduating with an English degree from Arkansas College (now Lyon College) in Batesville. Someone else may have shot him and made it look like a suicide. But I won't delve into that suspicion of mine here, or into the drinking and other problems Trip was having at the time he died. I'll just post a couple of photos from my 10th birthday with the fair-haired and geeky-looking Trip next to me on my right. Actually, Trip could be quite an insistent pest at times. He was more complex than just the nice, delicate child that most people assumed him to be. We were best friends at this time and up until junior high, when Pat Calkins and I became best friends.
