My Mom and Dad fell in love just before WW2.  Like so many in those days, they wrote to each other and planned marriage when Dad returned home from the war.  I remember when they had their 50th Wedding Anniversary in July, 1995, my father and mother asked others to identify themselves who had been married as long.  There were many 52's and some 49's.  Dad then: "so you guys couldn't wait until you got home".  I often think what it must have been like for them during those days.

I always think of my mother as coming from Christine, Texas where she was born, even though she lived a good deal of her early life in Kansas.  My father, however, was a pure Kansas kid.
 

Sam, Darlene and Luetta Williams	Fred, Bonnie, Fred Jr. and Glenn McMurry

Dad was always interested in movies.  He even had a "roadshow" business when he was young.  Perhaps that is where I got the DNA to go into the movie business.

Mom and Dad prepared an album of pictures for me that came in handy for this section.  First are the pictures of my Mom and Dad. My mother writes: "These are the pictures we had of each other for three years during the war".

Contained in these pages are the extensive autobiographies of my parents.  Click on the links below for a ride into history.  My father, Glenn, broke the ground in the family by documenting his life.  Soon thereafter, my mother emparked on the same journey.  My own "history", as we called it, was helpless to follow.

Before I was born, our family lived in Kansas where my father was born and where he met my mother.  For many of those first years of marriage, the McMurry's lived in a Liberty trailer.

Just before I was born, Mom and Dad packed up everything including my sisters Glenda and Jean, in a 1947 Ford (I think that may be it in the picture below) and towed the Liberty trailer to Southern California.  Dad really wanted to go to the University of Southern California (USC) and had managed to land a positon there.  So off everyone went, West to California.

Arriving in California, Mom and Dad found a place to park the trailer.  First in a trailer park, then in someone's back yard.  I was actually born when the family lived in that trailer.  That very same trailer was home for the McMurry's both in Kansas and then on Flower Street, in Los Angeles near USC until right after I was born.  It was in 1952, after there were three kids in the family that Mom and Dad purchased the 16' Terry Rambler.  It always amazed me that my folks purchased a smaller trailer now that they had 3 kids.  We kept that trailer for almost 20 years.  Mom says, that the very location where we lived on Flower Street is now covered by the Harbor Freeway (I-110).  In my father's autobiography, you can read a good deal more about our family living in a trailer.  Click here for a pretty good short story about trailer living.  Trailer living was a transitory period for the McMurry family.  It was an ends to a means.  We were destined for property ownership.

As you could imagine, a family of four living in a trailer was a bit much.  My Mom took on a job at Currie's Ice Cream and Candy Store working at night after Dad came home.

It was about four years after Jean was born my Mom became pregnant again.  This time, with me.  My mom got so big, so fast that for a while everyone thought I might be twins.  Dr. Dalke, who delivered me, assured Mom and Dad that I was alone in there.

KANSAS

From the beginning and well after I was born, the family kept its attachment to Kansas.  Most all of my parents family lived in and around Hutchinson, Kansas.  Our family vacations were spent visiting family back in Kansas for many years.  I feel lucky to have known some of my older relatives.  For example my "Great Grandma Deal" who was my Father's Mother's Mother, lived near by and we always visited when we were on those driving trips.

I have a recording of Grandma Deal reading a bedtime story to my two sisters.  This had to be a few years before I was born.  Click Here to hear that recording.