Sammy Gregg - FaunaClassifieds
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The Welcome Room & New Member Intros How about a place for new members to come on in, make an introduction, and meet the regulars? Talk about yourself or anything else that comes to mind, just to break the ice. Or just pull up a chair and make yourself at home for a spell.

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Old 03-17-2005, 01:21 AM   #1
shrap
Sammy Gregg

Well, lets see. It all started back in the Winter of 1968. America was in turmoil. Riots, demonstrations, Vietnam, burning bras, draft dodgers, civil rights, assassinations, free love, the British Invasion, LSD, weed, government corruption (as if that was anything new) trips to the moon....if nothing else it was not boring.

Sometime during the early months of that Winter my parents were either careless, stoned or actually thought it was a good idea to have another kid. So on a cold evening they decided to get stoned, put on a Beatles album and make love..... nine months later a curly headed bouncing baby boy entered the world.

My childhood was pretty normal. We lived on the outskirts of Indianapolis in a small housing addition. We had woods and fields and a creek right out our back door. I spent the better half of my life from age 6 to about 13 in those woods, fields and creek. My parents were afraid to enter my room because they never knew what critters they might find. I collected everything from rabbits to snakes to crawdads to turtles to every type of fish that was in the creek.

From an early age I was one of those kids that liked to take crap apart to see how it worked. I took anything and every thing apart that would not get my ass busted or grounded. By the time I was in my mid teens I could fix almost anything electronic or mechanical. Our basement was my "Work Shop". My mom always used to give me hell saying, "Clean all that crap up, it looks like a bomb went off down there". My brothers got to calling me shrapnel, then just Shrap.

I got my first real pet reptile when I was 12. One of my older brothers had a Ball Python that he had for a several years. This was in 1980. He was going into the military and gave it to me because I was always enthralled with it and had always kept all kinds of small critters from the woods around our neighborhood. It died on me in 1987. The vet said it was just old. He guessed that it was around 20 years old. I was truly heart broken.

At that point in life my interest in critters had gave way to my interests in skirts, partying and cars. Reptiles and other critters took a long hiatus from my life.

It was the Winter of 1988 and I was 19. I was bored to death with Indiana. Was sick of school and had turned down 3 scholarships to attend college the previous summer. I wanted to go see America and all its beauty instead of the corn fields I grew up seeing. I seen an ad in our paper for jobs at the Grand Canyon. So I went on an interview they were having here and the next thing I knew I was on a Greyhound headed for Arizona.

I was a maid at the Grand Canyon for about a year. I truly had one hell of a time there. I met a lot of really great people, drank a ton of booze, chased every skirt I spotted and hiked my ass off. It is truly amazing (at least for a guy from Indiana) how it can be 20 degrees and there be 2 feet of snow on the ground, but you hike for 45 minutes down in the canyon and it is 70 degrees and nice as can be. Two completely different worlds all in the same place.

After a year at the Grand Canyon a friend and I decided we were going to go to Alaska and work the fishing boats. We hitch hiked from Arizona all the way to Seattle Washington. That trip is a mini novel in and of itself and will have to be told at another time.

We got to Seattle with about $100 left between us. We were staying at the campgrounds at Salt Water State Park a little south of Seattle. After a few days we both found jobs on a floating processor ship for a company called All Alaskan Seafoods. They flew us to Anchorage and then to St.Paul Island to meet the ship. Which is out in the middle of the Bering Sea, a couple of hundred miles north of the Aleutian Chains. We made it to the ship with about $5 left a piece.

I spent that first year learning and making connections. The next 4 years I spent on commercial crab boats making BIG MONEY. We spent 4 to 5 months a year working and made on average $70,000 a year. Then spent the rest of the year off doing what ever the hell I wanted. When you are an Alaskan commercial crab fisherman you have truly earned the right to do what ever the hell you want. 18 to 20 work hour days, sub zero temps, cold, wet, tired, insane storms, 30 foot swells, near death experiences on a weekly basis.....

I kept an apartment in Seattle year round, but spent a lot of my time traveling all over the western United States and Canada. Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, Banff, Olympic, Cascades, Redwood..... you name it and I have probably been there. Life was truly a big party back then and I engaged in it with vigor.

In 1994 I came back to Indiana for a visit. Ran into an old girlfriend and became a daddy. That visit has now lasted 11 years. My daughter was born in March of 1995. The best thing that ever happened to me.

By the time my daughter was 4 I had split with her mom and got full custody of my daughter. The wild days of partying, chasing skirts and being as irresponsible as possible came to an end. In 1999 herps became a part of my life again. I got a couple of ball Pythons and have not looked back. My kids is into the herps as much as I am. We really enjoy the time we spend together on them. We now keep both Leos and Balls. We now have 6 Leos and 10 Balls. We raise our own crickets, mealies and rats.

I operate a small mom and pops PC shop out of my home for a living. Have since 1996. I am hoping to one day to just be able to do herps. I like PCs, but I love herps. I have invested a fair amount of cash in the last year in hopes of doing just that.

Well, that is a readers digest version of my life. I hope it kept your interest long enough to have read the whole thing.
 
Old 03-17-2005, 07:51 AM   #2
ms_terese
Welcome to Fauna, Shrap! I'm glad you included an explanation of your screen name, because I've been wondering about that...

Good luck turning your passion into profit!
 
Old 03-17-2005, 09:07 PM   #3
Karen Hulvey
Hey man I'm waitin' for the novel. You could write a book and sell it right here.... Just a thought.
 
Old 09-09-2008, 01:44 PM   #4
Mooing Tricycle
Just Perusing and found this thread sammy. Youve told me how you worked on those crab boats before, and i found it fascinating!

ready to tell us that Novel of a trip yet? ^_-
 

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