Did you ever imagine uncovering a secret family history filled with adventure, mystery, and unexpected revelations?

In this episode of Family Twist, Keith Mason shares his extraordinary journey of discovering his familial roots, ignited by a random YouTube clip of a 1960s game show. Keith's quest to learn more about his father, a man shrouded in mystery and cloaked in controversy, unfolds into a narrative that spans tales of deep-sea diving, secret siblings, and even connections to historical events.

Unraveling the Strands of a Hidden Past

Listeners will gain:

• Insight into the emotional impact of discovering hidden aspects of one's heritage.
• Strategies for navigating the complexities of new family dynamics and historical truths.
• Inspiration from Keith's relentless pursuit of his past, showcasing the power of curiosity and resilience.

Dive into this intriguing episode to explore the depths of a family history you never knew existed, revealing how the past can reshape our understanding of the present and ourselves. Click to listen now and unravel the mysteries of Keith Mason's familial saga.

Guest Bio:

Keith Mason’s years of storytelling began with music and cultural observation in Philadelphia newspapers, interviewing dozens of top artists from Jerry Garcia and Phil Collins to George Carlin and Monty Python. In 1978 the writer began a nearly forty-year career in public relations, nonprofit development and the performing arts, including stints at Drexel University and the Kimmel Center (home of the Philadelphia Orchestra) and for elderly, disability and addiction recovery services. He also created and taught a senior writing course at Temple University.

Keith was a producer for one of Philadelphia’s most cutting-edge theaters, and worked in radio for years, covering all forms of music and information. He also does commercial, corporate and education voiceovers.

The author has two grown children and resides with his partner, a businesswoman and former dancer and actress, in southern New Jersey, where he pursues gardening, travel photography and music.

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This is Family Twist, a podcast about astonishing adoption stories and finding family via DNA magic. I'm Kendall. And I'm Corey. And we've been inseparable partners in life since 03, 04, 05, also known as March 4th, 2005. In January 2018, our found family journey took us 3000 miles from the San Francisco Bay Area to New England, where we now live near my biological father, two half siblings and their families.

We love being near them all and the adventure continues. Thank you for joining us once again on Family Twist. Our guest this episode is Keith Mason, author of Please Stand Up. Thanks for joining us, Keith. It's nice to be with you on the program. Thanks for the invitation. And hello to everybody out there. Now, before we get into your story, we have something in common. We both started our interviews interviewing notable celebrities.

rolling over into the golden age of underground free newspapers that every college campus had and all the major cities had. Ours and Philly were the Daily Planet first, then the Drummer, those were the two classics in town. And the LA Free Press, the presses were really well known in the village voice, but they were far more substantial than the little rags that you would get picking it up as you went into the coffee house or the drug store or the campus.

student center, that sort of thing. Sure. But planning myself over into Philly, I became that guy, the one from your high school class who let his hair grow out as soon as he got out of high school and moved to the big city and was writing for one of these papers. And sometimes I was brilliant, Corey, and sometimes it was just dreck. I look back on stuff that I have in a box in my basement of what I wrote back in the 70s, and some of it was just.

Ridiculous. But meanwhile, I got to spend time in a hotel room on May 1st of 1977 with Jerry Garcia on the day that the Grateful Dead movie was premiered in New York. I got to hang around backstage with Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel when they were just skinny young Englishmen only a couple years older than me doing midnight shows at the local theater on their first Genesis tour. And I...

kind of specialized in the Philadelphia newspaper market as the one finding the little hidden gems. Other guys would be doing the new Led Zeppelin album. Other guys would be doing the Bowie and things like that. And I was a habitué, I think that's the pronunciation, of the coffee houses and the smaller clubs. So I just racked up dozens of people I got to spend time with and pursue George Carlin before anybody.

knew the second new important George Carlin hanging around in the sound booth with the Eagles on their first tour discussing arena mixes. I was that guy who got to have this really interesting life chasing people down and backstaging people and backstage passing with people. And just as you do well.

Frank Zappa, you've got an interesting story, tell us, dot dot dot. So I lucked into it, I pursued it, and got to be one of those guys. And it was a real hoot. A guy I was working with, Dave Frick at the Jommer for many years, ended up at Rolling Stone as a senior editor for three decades because he wanted to write about the new Aerosmith album every time it came out. I finally got sick of the life and I moved into radio and did other things. Nice.

Yeah, I was definitely the guy chasing people down as well. Backstage, doing what I, hustling, what I could. So I could definitely relate and those were good times.

And I would imagine that that experience helped prepare you to write this, your first book.

Well, there is a train that you can follow from editing the high school paper to being the features and music guy at the Rutgers paper to being the film and rock and roll and later jazz guy at the weekly distribution Philadelphia papers. And from there falling into a PR job for a then small.

which we grew into a really huge nonprofit community arts center in Philadelphia called the Painted Bride Art Center, which is still out there today. And became a senior producer and a PR guy there. And this was all a short form career. It took me then into nonprofit PR in all kinds of ways. So I was in education in the arts.

I spent seven years as the communications guy for a drug and alcohol rehab network, telling stories to the public that you can get help, you can get into recovery, you can put your life back together again. And that was kind of the peak of my professional career, arranging something, getting a story onto Action News, and having a guy come in the next day with his duffel bag and his mother saying, we saw you on Action News last night, I'm coming in here to get off of heroin.

Well, this is interesting and I'm a writer. I have to, I'm compelled to put something to paper. It would be dereliction of duty not to put this thing that was happening to me onto paper. And well, maybe I'll get up to 12 pages and Esquire will buy it. But as more things happen to me and people who find their families, people who stumble onto stuff, people who are making connections for the good, the bad and the ugly,

things keep happening, doors keep opening as you move forward on it. And my 12 -page, three -month plan turned into a six -month, 20 -page plan, which ended up as a nine to 12 -month, 47 -pager, which turned into this and which turned into that. And at some point, I'm looking at the, nobody's gonna buy a 95 -page short story, it's just not gonna happen. Looks like I have a book here.

So I had to apply every skill that I had and acquire a lot of new perspectives and allow myself to be inspired by people who mattered to me. Salman Rushdie with Joseph Anton and talking about the years he was in hiding in the fatwa, talking about himself but in the third person. And Eric Larson who does these wonderful histories of converging stories about the killer at the World's Fair and the Lusitania.

and Churchill's life, et cetera. So I allowed myself to be influenced. I studied a lot of new stuff and applied everything I had to turn this little tidbit short paragraph annual report nonprofit communications guy into a book author. So as you can see the timeline that I went through, but if I hadn't stumbled into the big thing, I'd have no book. Right. So this is a...

wild found family story with lots of twists. But the thing that you mentioned is discovering your father on YouTube on an old clip of the quiz show to tell the truth, which I love watching that show. And I never guessed right. So how did you stumble upon this clip? Well, it's a show I grew up with back in the black and white days, late 50s into the 60s.

And there's a new version that's out there now on one of the major networks. It's still going on. Three people come on stage, one of them a real person, two of them imposters trying to fool the celebrity panel to win some money and a caseload of cigarettes or Advil or something, whatever they're giving away these days.

four months, just enough to create me in utero before he took off.

uh...

I had this material in front of me about his career as a deep sea diver. He was raiding Nazi U -boats and sunken freighters from World War II off of New England to some level of controversy because on one hand he was bringing up history and on the other hand he was desecrating a grave site. So there was a real hassle going on with him. But it's not everybody who finds out about their parent when they're a teenager. Oh, he was in Newsweek magazine. Well, how about that? So I had something back there.

And as I discuss in the book, and I'm still not used to injecting that little phrase into my common conversation, well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, as I say in my book, it's a real NPR moment for me when I get to do that. So I talk about how I grew up as an only child, one of three million only children in the 1950s in this country.

because the dad didn't come back from World War II or the Korean War or he dropped over shoveling too much snow or he got hit outside the Brooklawn diner at that bad traffic circle or walked away from his wreckage of a family. There were three million paternal orphans back when I was a kid. And I erected an emotional wall around myself because I was not going to dignify this man who would do this to me and my mom.

was not going to dignify him with my curiosity. But things change. And Corey, you get into your 50s and your 60s. You start thinking about more stuff. You've got your own kids. Maybe there's a grandchild or more. You've got your own family going on. But what do you know about that other half of your family? You get curious. And besides, now there's an internet. And the internet has everything. So I spent some time idle 20 minute.

blips of my life down in the basement office in my house in southern New Jersey. And well, I got a little time. I'll put in a couple of key words. Let's just see. And a few things came up, some old newspaper articles from New England that had my father, Bert, in there and his underwater adventures and his controversies. But I finally, it petered out and I was not going to really pursue much anymore because I was not going to

do big genetic tests and DNAs and try to find a needle in a haystack out there. But I put in a couple of keywords one night and at the bottom of the organic list came up those keywords, Burton Mason, deep sea diver. But there was a picture of a little old white haired lady, an incongruous result. So, well, let's see what this is. Click and up comes this thing.

And because I knew it from my childhood, I knew what it was. It's YouTube, but I know what the words mean. I know what the picture means. And I know what the date means. It's an episode of To Tell the Truth from October of 1961. And I know that by clicking the go button, I'm stepping into something. I know it's there. It has to be. The results are in. So who's the little old lady?

But it's like stepping out of the airplane for your first parachute lesson. You're going into a new thing. Here I go. I know what it is. Click, go. And the first three people come on in the program. Johnny Carson is one of the celebrity panelists. Before he was Johnny Carson of The Tonight Show. Tom Post in the television comic. Kitty Carlisle, the doyen of New York, Glittery Broadway.

And three guys come on and they all claiming to be the ambassador from Sierra Leone. Couple of commercials. Then come the three little white haired ladies. They're rabbit experts. They go through their segment, couple of commercials. Then as the program did back in the old days anyway, three men in silhouette, can't see them. Then the spotlight hits them, the announcer, what is your name please? First one comes up, my name is Burton Mason.

Number two, my name is Burton Mason. Number three, my name is Burton Mason. And there are seven minutes there of three guys and there is no instantaneous identification. It wasn't like, wow, there, no. I had to work this through. And then you get to the point at the end of it where, okay, finally the panelists have voted and let's see what's what. Will the real Burton Mason please stand up? And one of them shuffles and another one stands and then sits down.

Number two stands up and I'm 64 years old and I'm looking at my father for the very first time, walking, talking, joking with Johnny Carson, winning a couple of hundred bucks because he fooled the panel. And that kicked me off down this remarkable eccentric road to discovering this guy because now I'm really putting my internet skills into it, Corey, and I'm finding all kinds of things.

And as had happened, would happen so often in this process and for a lot of your listeners who relate to this kind of story.

You think you've gotten to a place and well, that's as far as you can go. But what's this over here when you creak open this door or there's another rabbit hole to go down? And finding my father on YouTube led me to finding out that he was a sociopath, that he'd been married seven times to six women, that I had eight other brothers and sisters out in the world that I never knew about, that I had a grandfather who was a crusading reporter.

So across three and a half years, all of this history just kept coming at me and coming at me and coming at me. And I know a lot of people can relate to things that happen, because I know it happens, you know that it happens everywhere. I'll be standing in an elevator where the nurse were getting my sciatica checked. Now what do you do? Well, I'm a writer. Oh really, actually do you read much? Well, I have a book. Really, what's the book about?

And you find out that her husband's brother or somebody else on the husband's side of the family just recently found four sisters that they never knew about. You end up talking to people who have been given up at birth by a mother who couldn't give them the life that they should have and tearfully gave them up. And then 40 years later, they discover there's a biological mother and there's a tearful meeting and things are okay.

And there are also people out there who find other new family and things are not okay. So it runs the spectrum. It's happening everywhere. And millions of people are subscribing to the ancestry sites every year. It's more popular than gardening. So I fell into this whole new world and found all these extraordinary people. And it would be different, Corey, in terms of how I got to the book.

Please Stand Up, which of course relates to, well, who is this guy with seven marriages? And also to the TV show. So I was, I was clever there, wasn't I? Absolutely. But with so many people who are going through this, if I found my father was a pharmacist and my grandfather was a salesman for a farm equipment company and my oldest closest half brother,

who I did get to meet twice before dementia claimed him about two years ago. If he had been a who knows who, a teacher in Akron, Ohio, I would have just had this remarkable story to tell around the dinner table to friends. But my grandfather was who he was, my father was who he was, that brother in Akron was an honored homicide detective who'd been on cold case files. My father's first teenage,

wife was the daughter of the chauffeur who drove Henry Firestone around his tire factories in Ohio. He would come home from the office one day and say, oh, I'm home, dear. What did you do? Well, I spent the afternoon driving the boss and Calvin Coolidge and Thomas Edison around the factory. Nobody in these stories, Corey, was just a regular schmo. They're all these personalities. And

accomplishments and craziness. So more than just this, this tale around the dinner table that so many millions of people have, and you've got your background and a lot of your listeners have, and a lot of your guests have, they turn into these remarkable people who needed to have their story told, needed to have all the dots connected. And because I was a writer, like I said, had to do something with it. And boom, there's a book. Right.

But Keith, you found out this little bit of information about your father at 14 years old. 50 years go by, and you mentioned building a wall up around it. What chiseled away at the wall to make you think, it's time for me to do some digging?

Well, the digging came from the lure of the investigation. I was constantly coming across something and then I'd conclude my work day by eight o 'clock at night so that I wouldn't get beaten up by my wife. But I'd go upstairs, guess what I found? Or honey, come down. I mean, I was sitting here looking the first night at...

in terms of breaking down the wall, that just came with the investigations.

I'd gone through my whole life with a lot of other people, like women I was dating or friends I would develop. Oh, you really don't know anything about your father? Well, gee, don't you want to know all about your father? Well, no, actually, I'm really not that interested.

And as I went further into it, there are people. There are people who made other people. There are people who had these extraordinary dramatic lives that affected far more other people. I mean, I never would have thought in a million years my grandfather's death would be front page news on the Chicago Tribune with a type size that is normally reserved for World War II over or.

Hubs win the pennant. So as people came along, that did the chipping away. The detective -y part of it chipped things away. And ultimately, there was an understanding that came at the end that some of your guests I know of have already talked about.

where you answer a big question, sometimes for a person, it's why did my mom give me up for adoption? Sure, it's because she wanted me to have a better life, but ma, why did you do that? And maybe you find finally some answers when you meet somebody 40 years later on, 60 years later on. For me, those answers came chipping away, chipping away, and by the time I got to the end of,

my adventure, which in some ways is still going on. I had to deal with your disappointments and angers and frustrations and things that a therapist would really have a ball with if I let somebody get into it. But I had an ultimate question all along, Corey. What kind of a guy would do what he did to my mother and me? What kind of a schmo would do that?

to me. And by the time I'd gotten to the end of this, I had one answer and it's just an answer. It's not an excuse. It's an explanation. It's not a reason for me to say, oh, well, gee, I was all wrong. Nothing like that at all. But I did get my answer. What kind of a guy? Well, maybe it's a guy who saw his mother die in a car crash.

in a mishandled car crash caused by his dad when he was four years old. Maybe it was a guy who, with his dad's third wife, gets shipped off to a military academy in Tennessee when he's 11 years old. Same one the Allman brothers would go to later on. A guy who at 15 was terrible in high school, ran away from home, went back to San Francisco where the family had originated, joined the Merchant Marine because in the Second World War,

All the grownups were in the Navy or in something and they grabbed merchant seamen from wherever they could. As soon as you turned 16, and if you could slide in because you were tall when you were 15. Maybe a guy who was out there when he was 15 and 16 wondering if the torpedoes were coming for him. A guy who ended up in Cherbourg in France, a totally decimated city after D -Day.

that kind of guy would do what this guy did to me and my mom. So I at least came up with an explanation and later I had to deal with anger and forgiveness and things like that. And spoiler alert, I'm not gonna talk about how I met my father in a way at the end of the line. I did have a confrontation.

of sorts with my father. But I don't talk about it on air because a spoiler B, some other reason. Right? Sure.

So, as a teenager, your reality was you knew a little bit about your father. You knew you had a father. You didn't know anything about other siblings. How often did you think about that? Surely you thought, here's a guy who could be procreating all the time. In one of the Newsweek articles that I saw when I was a kid, it did mention this father of four who is a part -time heating engineer in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

So I said, okay, well, it didn't work out with my mom. He went out into his life. He created another life. Now he's got kids. Now this, yeah, okay. That's all right. Because again, I wasn't going to feel for him.

And I knew at that point, but after these discoveries came along, I went through all kinds of stuff. I went through the things that people go through in these studies. You go through the census records, you go through the shipping records and the immigration things. You get to use the sites that are full of newspapers and...

you're bumping into, you're working some keywords and you find some woman, some obituary of some 80 year old woman, but buried down in the text at the funeral home right up is this name. Oh, well what's that name? Is that the same name that I saw on this census report over here last month? And I've...

I don't literally have, but might as well have this big CSI whiteboard spread out in front of me with three by five cards and buttons and strings and pins really nearly all over the wall connecting stuff. So when it came to the siblings, they just sort of toppled in one at a time, starting with my older brother who had a completely different name. His last name was Smith because of his mother's own remarriage.

And I mean that was a piece of cake looking for a cop named Smith in Ohio. I could do that in my sleep. Six kids, two, his wife number two and four. My mom was number three sandwiched in between. Another kid from wife number five whose mother was killed in a gothic overnight mansion fire in Louisiana.

when Burt was away down in New Orleans, sitting on an old barge waiting for the next job to start because he was doing that kind of work. And his wife dies, his kid is at a friend's house, and that guy grew up to be in his mid -20s, died of AIDS in New Orleans. So that's the run -up. I certainly went through some adventures in,

contacting, I worked up a seven page paper to the guy in Ohio and had it delivered because I wasn't going to ring somebody's doorbell. I wasn't going to call up a phone number I found. Guess who? That could not go well at all. So it does happen. It does happen. Sent a piece of mail. The man's wife got back to me and we entered a relationship.

And my wife and I got to meet him halfway between Akron and Philly out in the middle of Pennsylvania, in State College, Pennsylvania. We had a very touching meeting with him. And a few months later, I took my son, who has just turned 30, on a road trip and we went to Akron. So he got to meet his uncle. And I got to meet two of my sisters who were traveling up from the South and we're all going to gather in Akron. So I got to meet three people all at once. I have another.

sister in Maine. I have a brother in Florida I never spoke to and I'm reassured that's because that's how he runs his life. It's not about me. I found another brother who lived an hour's drive from me in suburban Philadelphia. I could have almost you know fender bumped him in the mall in the suburbs and yelling at each other through the window you know wouldn't know that it was him.

He also passed about a year and a half ago of a drug overdose alone in a hotel room in Florida. So there are all these stories out there and they shared hours and hours of stories out there. And even though my older brother Rod, I only got to talk to for five minutes on the phone and meet twice before his dementia took him, I didn't have him my entire life.

Okay, at least I had him for two meetings, for two dinners, for two good times. And at the end of all that, as he got to know me some, he remarked to his wife, of all the people that have come to me now, these brothers and sisters I didn't know about, Keith is the most like me. And that's very special that he carried that because I feel the same way about him.

And they're all spread out. Most of them were not entranced with the book because in telling my story, they also had their story told. And I had to be very careful. They were adamant about a bunch of stuff. There were things that they didn't want to have in just because, okay, they're entitled to feel anything they want to feel. But as all these people and their stories became my stories,

A crime against one of them was a crime against me. A hurt, an injury, a deprivation, an abandonment by my father of one or more of them was a crime against me. So I had feelings about it and things to say about it. And it all ended up in Please Stand Up. But it's all true. It's all nuts. And I have...

occasion when I'm signing books at a Barnes and Noble or I'm just talking to somebody. I was talking to an assistant substitute mailman today at his van out on the sidewalk handing me the mail and we had this 10 minute existential conversation about his parents and my wife's dad just died and we just had reason to be talking and

because parents die, then you're getting older and you have your bucket list. Well, I gotta get this done before I cave in. And he asked me about my bucket list and I talk about the book and we have this conversation and I hand him this little slip that I keep in my wallet for people because his eyes light up here. Check this out. Everybody's eyes light up when I tell them in 20 seconds this thing that happened to me.

I'm not getting along with everybody in the newfound family. I'm almost alone again. But meanwhile, with a book I've been able, and with folks like you and your listeners, I get to share it with a lot of people and a lot of elements that I have people can relate to. So through this, I have, I want to get all philosophical about it, Corey. I've got this big family out there of people who are sharing in the story just by listening and reading.

And that helps. Absolutely. I was really taken by one of your previous episodes.

guy looking for his father who comes across his dad as the LA strangler or something like that. So I'm not the only one with spectacular, crazed, bizarre people out there that you find yourself attached to all of a sudden. Right, right. And as you stated, I mean, this is your story to tell. While it might not be something your siblings want to dredge up again, this is your truth.

I found a guy who is one of my father's old partners from New England. And he has his truth. And his truth was when I tracked him down, he was living down south. When I spoke to him, his truth was that my father was not a good oceanic salvage diver at all. He practically never went down.

He was a peer top wharf rat who would always be cooking up deals and doing stuff, but he was not the one who went into the water, which is a remarkable thing to hear because I've seen plenty of other evidence. He would go out to sea with a reporter from the Boston Globe and spend the day on the ocean and put on the suit and go down 100 feet to some wreck and bring up some artifacts.

So he did that, but this ex -partner who was so fed up with him back in the 60s, so indebted by him, so taken into some of his petty crimes on things, he was telling me, oh, Bert never went down to the sub. That's a bunch of hooey. I'd fall over my chair if you could show me that Bert actually ever went down to anything. Well, he has his truth, but there's his truth.

and there's a truth that can be documented as if there's a truth that somebody has from their own experience that's colored by everything going on in their life and their relationship with the person they're talking about. So he had his one truth, but it doesn't, pun alert, hold water when you stack it up against all the other things that I saw where Burt was out on the water and he did go down and he did have these.

adventures on things, even though he kind of blew them way out of proportion to be a big shot when he came up. I had the opportunity to, through a couple of steps of investigation, to come up with a guy in Corpus Christi, Texas to talk to. And he was willing to speak to me. So I arranged it just for my sense of theater. I arranged to have this call.

their story. I had this story that I developed from all this huge amount of research that went on for for two and a half years. So he had his truth and I was able to correct the record in some ways. But that there's a family that had their truth. Meanwhile, there's another truth sitting out there in the public record. Turns out that the guy in charge of the county sheriff's department down in that county in Texas now.

His grandmother was my grandfather's killer's sister. He had his truth from his family lore. Now, I'm on the phone with a sheriff, so I'm not gonna say, hey, you're an idiot, this isn't what happened. But I had the truth that I'd learned. He had his own truth. We swapped stories on it. So anybody who connects up with family, who connects up with...

works their way through any of these mysteries, I'd be surprised if somebody says, we all agree on everything that happened. True. Just to clarify, it was the son of the Zodiac Killer. But we would be happy to talk to the children of the LA Strangler if they have a family twist as well. You meet one strangler, you meet them. Right. So are you at closure? Is there more investigation you want to do? Where are you today?

People say, what's your next book I'm gonna read about? There's no, there is no next book. There's just this one adventure and this one book and that's what I've done. I'm not.

And Kevin Bacon was in the JFK movie by Oliver Stone. Yes, we're all connected somewhere. Cue the outer space, Twilight Zone music over there. In 1974, that same picture of my grandfather's tombstone led off a piece on Texas politics on CBS 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace. My grandfather's murder and how political violence as a topic, which sort of relates to the modern world.

His case is still being taught academically in constitutional media courses, in places like that around the country, and is the subject of people's master's papers. So my grandfather still bubbles out there.

My dad is a different story and his kids are walking around and his grandkids are walking around and life goes on.

Will you mention that this experience has helped you understand or helps you realize that there is a bigger family out there and not necessarily just blood relatives? How do you feel about the concept of family today?

Well, the way I feel about it is how I raise my kids. And I think I did a half decent job with my ex -wife considering the hell we went through sometimes.

You see so much out there that goes wrong. You have to come to the understanding that.

It's amazing that any given human being can wake up and get out of bed in the morning and conduct one's life when there is so much out there that can rip a family apart, that can destroy all of your hopes and your dreams and your futures with the click of a military -grade weapon in a schoolyard, you realize that...

you can just lose it all while you're pumping gas at the local convenience store and somebody decides he wants to take your old Chevy and uses his gun to get it.

There are people who get ripped away by medicine, who get ripped away by mental health. And I just try to tell my kids, you're the only ones you've got, the two of you. Don't let any rotten thing get in the way of the two of you being kind to each other.

or other people in my family who are estranged because...

That kindness isn't there.

People and their families are these very delicate creatures. You think you understand it all. Well, maybe you don't. You think you know everything there is to know. Well, maybe you don't. You may think that you know everything about yourself there is to know, and of course, that's a ridiculous statement to make. So people as people and families as the essential primal,

genetic units that you carry with you. It's so easy to trip up. It's so easy to fall. So I just try to teach my kids as best I could to.

not just make the best of it, but apply what kindness and understanding you can and sensitivity you can to make the best of it. Because, heck, you just never know. Right. I think that's wonderful advice. Well, Keith, I really appreciate you being so candid about some of the things that are in your book. And I also appreciate you keeping some things close to the chest because we would love people to go out and read it. Yes, I'd love to have people visit. Here we go.

www .pleasestandupmason .com. All one word. Pleasestandupmason .com. It tells you all about the thing and will pique your interest and from there you can go to Amazon and Barnes and other kinds of places. Please stand up. Maybe with luck we'll be coming to an Amazon TV set near you, but that's a whole different piece of life that I can't possibly talk about at this juncture. Thank you very much.

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