When I was about 11 years old, my family went to my Uncle’s house to visit. It was around Christmas, and in those days kids ate a folding table, usually in the kitchen, while the adults all sat at the dining table.
After dinner the adults sat around and played cards and drank beer, highballs, and shots, while my older brother and I were sent to watch TV in the living room. As we were flipping through the 5 channels we received, we came across the pilot movie for the TV series “Kung Fu” with David Carradine.
From the first clip of the Shaolin monks training and the wisdom of blind Master Po, I knew I had to learn martial arts.
David Carradine or his character had nothing to do with it, as he was just an actor, and his martial arts looked fake.
On the car ride home I couldn’t get the monks out of my head, and knew exactly where I needed to go to learn more. The library. For you young folks, a library is a public building that houses alot of books on all subjects, that you can borrow and take home.
My First Martial Arts Book
Back then there were no computers, internet, social media, YouTube, or Wikipedia. I went to the library as soon as I got home from school the next day and searched until I found a book on martial arts.
This was 1976-77 and there was little known about martial arts and hardly any schools, unlike today. I checked the kids section and found nothing, then went to the card catalog to look it up in the adult section. To my surprise there were about 5 books listed as being in the sports section!
I ran over to the sports section and scoured the spines of all of the books on the shelves looking for anything that said karate, martial arts, kung fu, anything! Eventually I came across a thick, purple, hardcovered book called “The Complete Book of Karate and Self Defense”
I grabbed it, ran up to the checkout desk, checked out the book, and ran home with it, wondering about all of the secrets it might hold.
Back then you could keep a book for two weeks and then you had to take it back, but if you weren’t finished with it you could renew it up to three times. I kept getting this book over and over, practicing everything it taught in the basement of my parent’s home.
This book was the core of my learning, like my Karate textbook, and as I came across another martial arts book, I would read those as well. By age 14 I had developed a pretty solid grasp of the basic punches, blocks, and kicks.
Learning From A Book
I trained regularly in the basement and during the summer I would take it outside in the back yard.
There was one Tae Kwon Do school in the area, Jong Park School of Tae Kwon Do on Oliver Street in North Tonawanda, New York. I had visited there a couple of times with a friend who began lessons there, but we couldn’t afford lessons.
The few times I visited though made me realize something. What I learned from those books was correct, and for never having set foot in a dojang before, I was performing the basics just as well as students that had been there a year.
From age 14 to age 18 I would continue to read every book that came into the Erie County Library System on Karate, Kung Fu, Judo, or Aikido. I also began making regular trips to the local drug store to pick up the latest copies of Karate Illustrated, Black Belt, Inside Kung Fu, Fighting Stars, and other martial arts magazines.
Finding Tang Soo Do
In 1978, the movie Good Guys Wear Black showed up on a TV commercial, showing a guy named Chuck Norris performing spectacular spinning kicks and a flying side kick through a windshield. I began digging through all of my magazines learning all I could about Chuck Norris, and found that he had learned the art of Tang Soo Do Korean Karate while stationed at Osan Air Force Base in South Korea.
Damn, he learned in Korea? There is no way I am getting to Korea to study! Afterward, any magazine that mentioned Tang Soo Do, I bought and studied. I just knew that Tang Soo Do was the art I wanted to learn, and little did I know what God had in store.
Keeping the fact that Chuck Norris enlisted in the Air Force as I went through high school, I batted around the idea of joining the military. The summer between my junior and senior year I researched every branch of service and decided to join the US Army.
Korea Bound
My first day of basic