Asa Lendil (SBC) Castleman

&

DeVona Rae Bartling

Family photo 1967

I was born in a small private hospital in Gridley, California; the first of the family to that time to be born in a hospital. My parents were the owners and operators of a small country store; groceries, gasoline and miscellaneous items. The nearest town of any size, Yuba City, was seven miles away, a long distance to travel in those days. Live Oak, a small community of "Dust Bowl" immigrants with some amenities, was four miles the other direction. This made Lomo Store the central gathering place for many "Okies" trying to "make it" in a new land. It also made it a great place for me to grow up, providing me with a continous parade of playmates; some of whom were relatives from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Texas and other mid-south states who were fleeing the depression. Being the only son with two older sisters, LaNita by seven years and Bethel almost ten years older, I suppose you could say I was "a little spoiled"; they had a real live doll to play with.

Being the "baby" of a depression family that had acquired a little more security than most "dust bowlers" probably added to that "spoiling", I SUPPOSE! However Dad always insisted that his kids earned and respected what they had, nothing came free, he instilled the work ethic early (My sisters learned that lesson sooner and better than I). My first two wheeler was not a present! Even though I was not a farm kid, dad bought me a baby pig to raise. The money I earned form the sale after the pig was grown paid for my first bike. I was about four years old.

I didn't get to ride that bicycle to school however, I started the first grade at age five and it was about two miles to Encinal Elementry, much too far for me to ride my little bike alone, I rode with my sister LaNita on her bike, she had a boys style bicycle with a bar to sit side saddle on. Once I let the heel of my right shoe get into the spokes of the front wheel, throwing the both of us almost completly over the handlebars. By the time I entered the second grade LaNita had gone on to high school at Live Oak, they had a school bus; I got her bike.

I turned 17 in February of 1951 and in my own inimitable way, commited three of the biggest mistakes of my life within the next three months, I quit high school in my senior year to join the Marine Corps with dad 1951 "to fight them comunists" in the Korean "conflict", and got married.

DeVona Rae Bartling was born at Omaha, Nebraska on 2 September 1934. She was the second child, an older brother, of a first generation American German father and his child bride of English descent. She was raised in a small farming community in South Dakota where her parents lived until they moved west after World war II, to a small town near to Yuba City where I then lived. We were married in Reno Nevada on the 10th of May 1951, I was 17, she was 16. Most of the next three years we were separated as I went through training in Southern California and then went to Japan and Korea, our first child, Deborah Lynda was born at the Mather Air Force Base hospital near Sacramento, California on 23 December 1952 a short time before I was shipped to Korea. I returned home through the Golden Gate on my 20 birthday, 24 February 1954 and was discharged from the Marines days later at Treasure Island Naval Station, San Francisco, California. When I returned from my stint in Korea, my daughter didn't know who I was and it was some time before she became used to "that strange man" sleeping with her mother.

Now the hard times really started. I had no work experience other than the Marine Corps, and there was not a large market for Tank Drivers in civilian life. I did not have a high school diploma and the nation was moving into a deep recession for the next couple of years. Trying to find and keep a job was very difficult and for the next fourteen years we moved many times to many places in California. Our second child Adrienne Rae was born at Yuba City California on the 30th of April 1955. Third child Stephen Buckhannan Castleman II was born on 13 November 1958 at Marysville, California and our last child William James Castleman was born 24 March 1963 at San Jose, California. About four years later, DeVona, after sixteen years of trying and many indiscretions on my part, finally had all she could take and divorced me on 12 August 1968. She married again after a few years to a really nice man, Kenneth Finley and they were married for over twenty years before DeVona died on 13 March 1997. I have not remarried.