John Young
The story of the Masked Kid is my story at an early age when my parents 'pulled up stakes' and moved to Colorado.My mother told me that Dad quit his job in middle management in Michigan and took us to a vacant lot in the Big Thompson Canyon. There he single-handedly built a house using skills he couldn’t possibly have acquired in a suburban environment. I was three and a half years old when we arrived on that vacant lot.She said my life would have been entirely different and I would have been a different person if he had not done that. I believe her.My dad was a phenomenal man.He had been raised on a farm, the middle son of a family of nine, in the days where people had a lot of kids for two reasons: one was because there was no birth control and the second because they needed free labor.He was used for the latter, and through it learned to build or make everything he needed and wanted.Hence, he had the 'know-how' to build a house (his first) in the Rocky Mountains at 8000 feet while we shivered in a temporary 'tarpaper shack'.With only four other kids in the vicinity, I spent a lot of time alone with my imagination, fueled by Old Time Radio and comic books.This is the story of the clash between imagination, illusory self-deception, and reality.And how reality won out.
