How it all started for me
By Bob Kimball

I met a girl in California.  She was a girl friend of a guy I worked with.    I was at a Disco bar, OK stop the laughter, it was 1976.  I had met her before, but didn't pay to much attention as she was a friends lady.  She walked up to me and said hey Bob  For the life of me I did not know who she was.  She noticed the confused look on my face, and reminded me that she was Dave's ex girl friend.  I remember telling her that I hoped she and Dave would work things out.  I was too busy hitting on the bartender to think anything else about her.  After a very short and disastrous fling with the bartender, i would still see her at the bar.  We began to dance with each other, and before you knew it we became an item.  Her name was Dara Robinson.  We fell in love and married in 1977  Shortly after our marriage I was laid off from my job.  Money was getting harder and harder to come by.  Dara put out a call to her father, David Robison who was an observer for Petty Ray.  Although we were married I had never met her dad.  I talked to him on the phone, and he asked us if we wanted to join a doodle bug crew.  Doodle bug.  What the hell was that?  He tried to explain it to me over the phone, but had know idea what the hell he was talking about.  Dara and I threw caution to the wind.  We packed what we could into a U-haul trailer, and set out from California to Clifton Forge Virginia.  It was winter so the going all the way across the good old USA took us nearly a week.  When we finally arrived Dara's dad took me to work the very next day, and i got introduced into the world of doodle bugging.  Being a California guy, I could not believe the cold.  Dave gave me A yellow ski suit to wear, and i remember feeling like a walking banana.  You soon realize that a crew is family, and you have to prove yourself.  I remember that it was hard for me as Dara's dad was the observer and the crew thought I would get cut some slack.  No way.  You pull your own way or you get your ass kicked.  At the worst they would just run you off the crew.