Mike: So I had to get an apartment in New York City, which was costly. And then you get a raise to $45 a week. Well, that's still no money. And then to $60, and that's still no money.

But I got promoted into the research department and then an assistant account executive and an account executive, and by now I was kind of figuring the business out. And at one point, it came clear to me. I said, "You know, if you jump ship and get another job, they won't be playing this game, 'Hey, Kennedy, we just gave you a 30% increase.'"

Well, 30% of nothing is nothing. So I went to another ad agency and became an account supervisor and a vice president, and then I went to yet another agency and I became what they call a management supervisor and a senior vice president and a member of the management committee.

And I was actually pretty successful. And I was starting to make really a lot of money. And by this time we had three children, and we were still living in Manhattan, and back then at that time, private schools for the three children would've been more than my Ivy League education.

And I said, "This is kind of crazy." Another thing had happened. Because we lived in New York City in a nice apartment, I had the desire to start reliving my real youth with my children. So I bought an old farmhouse, a two-hour drive north of New York City, and lo and behold, it was very similar to that episode when I was five years old. It did not have running water. It was just an old farmhouse.

Bought it for not a lot of money. It needed a lot of fixing up, and this is where I started to become a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, a mason, a roofer. And because it was in the Catskill Mountains in the woods, a lumberjack, an arborist. Jane got her first garden. She was a city kid, and, you know, lo and behold, you've got tomatoes that are wondering [where to] plant and so on.

So I suddenly had this weekend life of being a kind of a blue collar guy hanging out with all the rednecks in the Catskill Mountains. The cussing and the spitting, I didn't do that, but they did. They introduced me to guns, which of course I was savvy with from the Army, but I didn't own any at the time. Tractors came back into my life, and little by little, we got that old farmhouse fixed up. It was our weekend retreat, but this was the farm boy in me was reemerging.

And it continued on until 1982, and what had happened in that period of time is one of those redneck guys up in Ulster County had said on an October day, "Hey, Mike,  you're going hunting?" And I said, "Oh, gee, Jerry, I don't know." And suddenly everybody was walking around in red and black checkered wool shirts, and you started hearing rifles popping off everywhere as guys were practicing. And so I get myself a gun and sight it in, and I get a hunting license. And I guess I wanna say it was a moment that changed my life.

'Cause I got out in the woods, and of course, when I don't know how to do something, I research it, and I read about it, and I ask questions, and I find experts, and within a couple of years, I was actually a pretty good deer hunter.

And I was a very accomplished amateur gunsmith. I gave myself a handle back then, 'cause I think I had a CB by that time, and I called myself The Dead Eye. I won just about every marksmanship contest that I got into. I wound up teaching marksmanship and gun safety all the way up until the time we moved to Wyoming.

Note: The transcript above has been condensed from its original audio recording to improve the flow and readability of the story.