Ashley Cardoza Cardoza 1 Professor Harris
English 1A
6 April 2014
Growing Up on the Dairy
David Cardoza was born on November 21, 1953 on a small dairy farm in what he refers to as the "middle of nowhere," California. He grew up the youngest of three children of an old fashioned Portuguese couple who ran the family dairy. Today he is far from that dairy as he sits in front of a computer in his office with a Bluetooth in his ear on the phone for the fourth time in a fifteen-minute span, apologizing again for the interruption. His office is filled with the many awards he has won, pictures and drawings from his grandchildren, and to the right of his computer is a small picture of a young boy standing on a farm looking exhausted and dirty from a long day of work. The picture is of David when he was about eleven; he says he keeps the picture on his desk to remember where he came from and to show how far he's come.
Dairy cows at Comboyne, NSW
Eggs of a Quail (Coturnix sp.), in comparison to a...
English: A woman wearing a bikini inspects a sales...Growing up family was everything to David. His father helped run the dairy with other members of the family while his mother took care of the children. David, his brother Bob, and sister Shirley worked alongside their father on the dairy mostly doing chores that ranged from milking cows to collecting chicken eggs. "I hated those chickens," David says "they were loud and would peck at your hand when you tried to take their eggs." As a teenager school was not very important to David, he spent more time causing trouble with his older brother than he did going to school. "The cops knew my mother so well that when they would show up at the house she
Cardoza 2
would invite them...