there like library tonight we are very excited to have a local are there larry bowers scanned in with us just to know the program is funded from the for money the minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund and before i hand it over to our guest i'm just going to give a brief little introduction larry bowers scanned and has served as a correctional foster parent probation and parole officer and jail counselor during his four decades of conflict in troubled youth he now dedicates his time to writing and motivational speaking tonight we'll be hearing about his experiences working to help youth turn their lives around from his book faces on the on larry bars and i've written a book called faces on the clock took me about three years to figure out a title but one day i figured out  life which is basically what i'm talking about in the book is comprised basically of two things number one time and number two the people that you meet during the time the two have on the service and the relationship that you have with and so that's what this book is about  for the first nine years of my life i lived a real mormon wife and a normal neighbor a middle class lower middle class neighborhood  family was close still was and i'm january third of nineteen fifty eight i woke up and my right foot seemed to be asleep the only problem is that three or four hours later it still had an awakened and my mother and dad brought me to a doctor and i wound up in the hospital a couple hours later and that's where i remained for about four and a half months in a way i think that's where my life started when i was nine because the normalcy was all over and life really began in one of the things that you can imagine i was by the second i was worried i was so scared petrified to death and i'm relying on my bed that first night going what's going on what's happening to me and thi figures showed up and stood at my door of my room and it turned out to be the paediatrics president at the time and as i found i was i was to find out he was to be one he was probably my closest friend in the whole hospital for the entire four and a half months here we are fifty six years later i think if i did my math right and we're still friends he's in better shape than i am but we're still friends  during the course of that four and a half months are a whole lot of firsts for me scary firsts not so scary first lots of people that i wound up liking and loving whatever but i also see six and seven year old kids dying of various diseases primarily it seems to me it was a leukemia i remember a little girl of but i think she was about six that it's i never heard her speak a word for about four months every time i saw she was sitting on a rocking horse in the girls ward destructing back and forth and back and forth she also had leukemia and one night i was out of the dark in the hallway and i heard a scream and it was her mother she had just passed away the good things were were peppered with the reality i guess of there were some bad saying there were some funny things i remember the first time dr floyd walk room and started talking to him about a catheter and i remember saying to them you're going to put what where and the next time you came and you started talking about spinal tap well i thought a needle in the arm was obscene to say nothing my first physical therapy treatment i was like fifty eight pounds i believe a draft of a bikini being wheeled into a cold noisy room put on a stretcher and then hoist to the above a pool of water which looked like a horse trough to me and i'm looking over the side and i'm seeing this churning water the structure and i thought he was getting ready to let me go into the water well so six months ago my doctor read the book and he told me that doctors should read my book and i said why and he said because and then he went out to talk about that particular physical therapy treatment and he said we don't we don't think about how petrifying that kind of  therapy session first therapy session first spinal puncture first catheterization can be to somebody so he said if doctors were to read your book and say the next time i have a young patient or i have a elderly patient maybe i better spend more time talking about what it's like in trying to reassure the patient and i thought yes that's exactly what this is all about start i think of the molding of my head in terms of what i wanted to go into what i wanted to do with my life of course i promised my doctor for  actually listened to me when i was talking and i was maybe impressed by that and when they left i was kind of happy that they left at least having smiled at me rather than continuing the tears and i kind of so while this time one on that thought of wanting to help people that idea wanting to help people somehow got translated into teaching so i get into college eventually and i want to major in history only i couldn't get a decent grade in history and one day i took an exam mid quarter exam and in the history class and i really really studied i really really thought i would i did well and i did the day of the professor gave the test back  probably seven hundred fifty freshman in the class i got my test back and had an a plus and i went yes and a couple of minutes later the professor starts talking about going through the tests and having decided that the test was the exam was too hard and because it was too hard he was going to throw out t you know is this am i getting a message said teaching is not what you're supposed to do so i had a class schedule and i just for the heck of  never had one before and i fell in love with it so i changed majors became a psychology in a criminal she major thousand sixty eight i was offered a job working with a bunch of slightly delinquent delinquent teenagers who were causing the community local community some problems on i was supposed to try to deal with their school problems and their family problems whatever i'm twenty years  talk about interesting and this is the one of the things i want to tell you is that there is all sorts of interesting wonderful people in this world some of them are kids some of our adults some of them are criminals i used to work with with a lady in a jail that had seventeen distinguishable personalities and i think i used to talk to five or six of them every night how can you not i used to love walking in the place because it was a hundred  sixty people twelve staff one with seventeen personalities that was one hundred seventy two you know some people wonderful things wonderful people interesting people you just got to be aware of on you know you've got a you've got to believe that it's not knowing president obama necessarily jail come up to me once or be referred to me aunt and he told me that he was the only reason he was in jail was because his spaceship had crashed on earth he told me what planet he was from had a wife three kids so i remember that and i started to try to get him to crack because i thought he was just you know before my time so for an hour i tried to get him to crack and he was just serious hour for a three a tomorrow never saw the guy again but my point in the book is that there's all sorts of wonderful interesting dangerous people out there gotta get involved with them that's that's how you make yourself and on the surface you know you my my my foster kids oh my foster kids used to get bored or they used to complain about being bored it's a robot shop oh i know i had one kid first i get it he is developmentally disabled there's a snowstorm going on i've got about ten kids ready to get home from school so i looked at this could a land of the helicopter on my back there one of them was an eighteen year old died of aids but i spent ten days with a man on hospice you know and it was like an out of body experience because we were talking about his funeral we had pictures taken we bought us cop and we developed a list of people he wan had never done this before but we did that and i am and i am looking at him for ten days and i'm sighing you know i think i'd be falling apart and he was just as to this wonderful interesting dangerous screwed up whatever other adjective you want to use to describe this horrible but we wastes i don't want people to waste time i don't want people to waste time being a trouble i don't want kids to waste time you know adding to the taxpayer's burden at the rate of a hundred bucks a day to cuss too  ed forty one dollars a day on the average to keep the kid locked up in this country so i say that you know i say to parents you can't just sit there in front of your or whatever you got to start getting proactive we've got to start going to school board meetings and taking control of this country of high school seniors nationwide one of the questions was located at the state of texas on the map of the world in the greater percentage up to put texas in nicaragua what what's wrong with a with the first a second year medical student looking at me and saying why do i have to know how to spell i have spell check i mean maybe i'm just maybe i'm just an old person i don't know but what happens if the wireless system goes down if you don't have access to spellcheck so you know i'm not i'm not going to be around for but you know my kids my grandkids they're going to be around i was just afraid that they're going to have they're going to have to learn the hard way you know we need that we need to make some changes we need to quit in stead of trying to blame whoever's out there for my problems my father my mother my dad insisted that it was him that gave me this problem and i used to tell  not going to do it anymore so the book takes you through it's my life but it's not it's not solely about me it's about it's about kids it's about life it's about it's i was telling somebody the other day and i know people away i'm going to be not far from friendless the only difference is the humanity difference and that's really kind of the way i feel if i if i died tomorrow would be perfectly all but perfect happy with my wife and this doesn't scare me it did at one point but it doesn't it doesn't anymore you know the people in it siblings in the same family it's something called rational emotive therapy used to be a big issue i hope and so was because basically it says that two people in a family or three people in the family all experienced the same  one kid's one child commits suicide the brother or sister becomes a doctor another sibling in the same family becomes a serapis and i want to what do you know what's going on there it's three kids same family same event three different reactions you don't have to end your life because you lost a parent i mean you have to process the grief you have to get through it that's true but suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem you know instead of saying i can't take this i'm going to end my life and the youngest life i have lost is the love of it was also the first you know there was nobody there to help that kid process or was of on of the time so but what you said is is true think positive you don't have to choose suicide because  steve hartman asked me wants if i want i want to have one thing that i taught my kids what would it be nice told him how to hug relatively simple you know but i remember going to a foster parent meeting once and having a foster parent get up in front of i don't know how many foster parents have kids you know all that kind of stuff so it turned out she was smart well i waited twenty five years i asked her again she said yes so now we have ok oh you know i've said to her you know you're going to have to be a mom to a bunch of thirty five to fifty five year summer spring tornado season you know that kind of thing and we live in a town home and there was a tornado watch and then i watched turned into a warning we've got no basement know so way up in the bathroom find yourself something to do where you can touch people i don't necessarily mean that way but i used to have an eleven year old kid that and i weren't charlie after the first time that that was my signal to pick him up carry him downstairs set up my rocking chair not everybody's type of work they don't want to choose what's behind that you prefer what you can see because you can count on it you know what it's going to do what it takes to you know get x y or z reaction if you choose that one if you choose the unknown  but i think of the sky and i say to myself tick tock tick tock he's miserable and he will not do anything people in your life that kind of determine the quality of it and what i'm saying is you find quality human beings sitting at a bus would rather i think see what's going on with that guidance at the bus stop than anybody i can think of in washington d so that's what the title is all about time and quality of relationship with the people that you know i guess maybe i'd have to say that  most important part is to tell kids and i want to tell kids in every way i can possibly tone don't waste time because you don't know how much you've got don't take the necessary risks because if you take no risks at all you're still at risk if you walk across the street and get hit by a mack truck and it's all over and the other one is crime you know ten years whatever until i retire and then you can wise up but please for the typing continue to be you know the way you are here here's here's one of the great things about life here's one of the great things about being a b s or like me and if you notice my wife and i i had an inmate write me a letter once chronic drug  i don't care if you can promise me if you can promise me the following one i won't have to treat you in a hospital for an overdose i won't have to support your family i won't have to bury you i want to have to pay a hundred bucks a day in minnesota to keep your butt in prison for twenty years thirty years whatever if i just planted  then why don't i keep up with the b s you know i've had kids come f i had a kid wants who's father was a psychologist a ph d and this kid had left my home and was being boarded i guess by our known gay pimp i've had kids that were products of doctors i had sids who were products of whatever the heck society thinks is the opposite of a doctor or whatever and they come out fine i had a i had a kid and an asian kid the only problem the only reason he was with me was if i was his parents in his country i me what the american teenager that's stolen a card you know that's been hanged so as soon as i figured out it was a lack of i don't know where he is now i'd love to hear him i'd love to see him i love to know i'm still looking for some of his kids for years i've been looking for kids if there is one kid he's on the video steve harper and i think became aware of the  called the media feeds each other i guess are up and down the line anyway and so his op was called from new york one day and of course i thought  he's an iowa right now and he wants know if you're going to be home for the next couple days and i said yeah and he said while he'll see you day after tomorrow or something so he shows up at the house and he's there most of the day for three days but the book isn't really what i really want to know i really want to talk to kids about life and living on their parents and their attitude and it's a parent's about hope teenagers eventually cease to be teenagers and usually get about the business of becoming productive citizens that's what i really want to do