When he was born in 1923, Flip's mother wanted him called Hugh, middle name Bert, but the doctor smashed it all together on his birth certificate and so he ended up without a middle name. And it did not make much difference, because everyone called him "Flip" anyways.

He went to the Amsterdam public school (he walked because only girls got to ride the bus) when he wasn't distracted on the way there, and he graduated the 9th grade.

He joined the Works Progress Administration's (WPA) Civilian Conservation Corps (3Cs) at 16, and helped to build the Boulder Dam, which was later renamed Hoover Dam in honor of President Herbert Hoover.

In 1943, he joined the Army, and served as a Staff Sergeant in World War II in the Reconnaissance Company of the 656th Tank Destroyer Battalion.

After the war, he married Kathryn Louise Morgan and had one child, Cathy Jean.

He was a Coal Miner (electrician, mechanic, and cutter). He had his left leg smashed between two mine cars at the Y&O Coal Co. mine in 1961, and was bedridden for a long time. He used to draw cats' asses on the faces of the walls in the mine with chalk, and spent an entire shift scrubbing them off once.

He was a skilled carpenter, a fisherman (with stories to compete with the best of them!), a gardener, a tinkerer, my grandfather.

He told me once that he knew that when he died he would just "become everything again." He said, "When you die, you don't just disappear. You get put back into it." He wasn't afraid of anything his whole life. He always just said things, matter-of-factly, like he knew something everyone else didn't know. 

He loved to read, and he loved to tell stories, but he never wrote anything down much because he wasn't a great speller.  Before he died in 2006, he told me, "I don't know how you do what you do with words.  But keep doing it."

 This prize is in memory of that sprit, in memory of him.