Family Overview

The Currents That Carry Us

By Charlie Calhoun

Introduction

Family, to me, has always been more than a word. It’s a current — something invisible yet powerful — that pulls you forward even when you’re not aware of its motion. My own current began in Farmers Branch, Texas, a small suburb just north of Dallas. I was born there, though the memories of it aren’t mine. By the time I was old enough to notice the world around me, we were already gone — bound for Tulsa, Oklahoma, where my father’s work as an engineer would become the quiet compass that guided so much of our family’s story.

Beginnings: A Move Toward the Future

My dad worked for Texas Instruments back then — the same company that made the calculators everyone carried in school, but his world was much larger than that. He was part of the invisible army of thinkers and builders who shaped the modern age. When I was eighteen months old, he accepted a position at Rockwell International in Tulsa, joining their Quality Assurance Department as an electronics engineer. That job would take him into the heart of America’s technological frontier, working on projects like the Space Shuttle Robotic Arm and the B1 Bomber.

I sometimes imagine him there, under the sterile hum of fluorescent lights, studying blueprints that stretched across drafting tables like star maps. The robotic arm reached into the silence of space — the mechanical extension of human curiosity — while the B1 Bomber embodied power and precision, a creature of the Cold War skies. His work was meticulous, and though I couldn’t have known it then, I think his love of order and accuracy shaped the way I see the world: not as chaos, but as a system that can be understood, repaired, and sometimes even improved.

Upheaval and Resilience

But even precision can’t outmaneuver politics. When President Jimmy Carter cut the B1 program, the project that had consumed so much of my father’s energy vanished overnight. Rockwell began to downsize, and my dad was laid off. I can only imagine what that must have felt like — to pour yourself into something that suddenly ceased to exist. Yet, in the way of so many determined men of his generation, he didn’t stop to lament. He found a way forward, transferring to Rockwell/Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

And so we moved again — trading Tulsa’s Green Country for Iowa’s rolling green. We spent about eighteen months there, long enough for the seasons to leave their marks on my memory. But while Dad’s career found stability, our family’s foundation began to crack. My parents eventually divorced, and my mother, my sister, and I returned to Tulsa, the place that had once represented my father’s ambition but now became the ground where we rebuilt our lives.

Even in the quiet heartbreak of that time, I never doubted the strength of family. I was surrounded by it — not just the people in my immediate circle, but the generations stretching out behind me. When I was born, I had all four grandparents and all eight great-grandparents still living. It’s a rare gift, one I only recognize now for what it was: an inheritance of presence, of memory made tangible.

Roots and Role Models

My maternal grandfather drove for Greyhound. I used to love hearing his stories — the miles he clocked, the strangers who climbed aboard and disappeared into their destinations, the sunsets he watched through the wide front window of his bus. There was something almost poetic in the way he talked about the road, as if every trip was a small adventure, every passenger a fleeting chapter.

My paternal grandfather, by contrast, worked for Sears. He was a department manager — steady, reliable, grounded. If my mother’s father had the restless soul of the traveler, my father’s father had the quiet dignity of the builder. He took pride in order, in responsibility, in doing things right the first time. From him, I think my dad learned the patience that engineering requires — that ability to solve problems one deliberate step at a time.

Before them came the great-grandfathers, whose stories form the deeper soil of my ancestry. One worked for the U.S. Postal Service, a man of duty and routine. Another tilled the land, understanding the seasons and their stubborn rhythms. A third ran a resort and later worked in home improvement retail — a man who must have understood both hospitality and handiwork. And another was a farmer too, a man whose labor was measured not in paychecks but in harvests. Their lives were not glamorous, but they were the foundation of everything that came after. They endured droughts, wars, and uncertainty — yet they built lives defined by work, faith, and family.

Carrying the Legacy Forward

Those traits, passed down like heirlooms, became the unseen architecture of my own character. When I look back on the turbulence of my childhood — the moves, the job changes, the divorce — I see that resilience everywhere. It lived in my mother’s quiet determination to keep us steady, in my father’s refusal to give up when his work vanished overnight, and in the long line of hands that built, farmed, repaired, and provided.

Years later, I began building something of my own. In 1996, I got married — a milestone that felt both terrifying and beautifully certain. Two years later, in 1998, my wife and I welcomed twin boys into the world. There are few moments in life that truly change everything, but that one did. Holding both of them — tiny, perfect, and already so alive with potential — I felt the full weight of ancestry settle into my heart. All those generations that came before me suddenly felt close, like invisible witnesses standing in the room. I understood then that family isn’t just what we inherit — it’s what we create and carry forward.

We made our home in Owasso, Oklahoma, where we’ve lived ever since. Owasso has been the backdrop of my adult life — the place where laughter has echoed through the walls, where we’ve watched storms roll across the plains, and where I’ve come to understand that roots don’t have to be old to be strong. My sons grew up there, just as I grew up in Tulsa. And through them, I see that same current of curiosity, resilience, and integrity that has run through our family for generations.

The Living Circuit of Family

Family, I’ve learned, isn’t static. It’s alive — a living circuit connecting past to present, parent to child, loss to hope. My father once worked on robotic arms that reached into space, but the truest extension of any person isn’t made of metal and wire. It’s the legacy of love, endurance, and faith that reaches from one generation into the next.

When I trace my ancestry, I see more than names on a chart or occupations on a census record. I see a constellation of stories — bus drivers and engineers, farmers and managers, husbands and mothers — all moving through time with the quiet conviction that family is worth building and keeping. That’s the current I was born into, the one that carried me from Farmers Branch to Tulsa, to Cedar Rapids, and back again. It’s the same current that flows through my sons today.

And someday, when they trace it back, I hope they see what I see: not just the past, but the steady, shining line of love that has carried us all this way.