The first hardbound book I ever bought, was at the age of nine. It was this guys book, ‘All About Dinosaurs’. I couldn’t understand all the large words, so, I asked my grandma, Jewel Gates, to help me out. She taught me how to use a dictionary. The best advice I ever got…Now, Roy was something else. Why, they have so many thousands of crates still unpacked at numerous museums all over the world, their not sure what the guy found. He was the first man to find dinosaurs eggs. Spielberg ripped him off for the Indiana Jones character…When he was a kid, he left home, hitchhiked to the closest museum, slept on the back steps until they finally hired him as a janitor. He hooks up with one of their marine biologists. He ends up in the field, helping secure a pilot whale off a nearby beach for an exhibit. This leads to his career as the numeral uno guy of all time for bringing back scientific anomalies…So, with this project under his belt, as a teenager, he’s sent by the museum to get a skeleton of a Sperm whale, to hang in the ceiling of a new exhibit hall the museum is building. Roy arrives at the huge rendering plant, bag of clothes and not much more in hand. He gets pointed towards the foreman of said plant. As Roy is waiting for the man to set him up on a ship, he starts a conversation with a man with a long flensing blade who’s cutting long strips of flesh off a whale, half pulled out of this enormous bay all the whaling ships are anchored in. Now, this bay is also FULL of HUGE sharks, feeding off all the whale entrails the men washed into it with high pressure hoses. There’s whales pulled up by winches, all around Roy, awaiting rendering. The man wonders if Roy would like to try flensing a whale. Roy drops his bag and takes the long blade. The man takes him over to another whale. As the man stands back, Roy pokes the blade into the carcass. The explosion blew Roy thirty feet out into the bay. The man had chosen that whale, just for that reason. It had filled with gas from decomposing. Roy struggles out of the shark filled bay, covered in whale guts. Roy then starts laughing. He knew he had been had. The men took him in and showed him the ropes on whaling for a year. Even letting him fire the harpoon cannon. It ‘made him’…but, those are other stories…
