“My day starts having breakfast with wife Barbara and daughter Renee, who lives with us. Renee does the cooking, thank goodness,” Kenn Acker says laughing.

 

Then Renee and Barbara are off to work at DermaSmooth Medical Spa in the Memphis Place Mall and he is off to golf or exercise.

 

“My caregiver from Comfort Keepers comes four hours a day. She is my hanging out buddy and chauffeur. We are off to the hardware store or shopping and then she makes lunch. We are making placemats out of the tons of photos that Barbara, Renee and I have taken over the years. Then we will take the placemats to be laminated. We just finished making Texas stepping stones painted with the state flag.”

 

If he is watching TV during the day it is game shows – especially “The Price Is Right,”

with his therapy dog, a six pound poodle named Lacee who reminds him when to take his Parkinson’s medicine.

 

“Dad went with me to the new Buddy Holly Hall last October when “The Price Is Right” was being filmed here,” says Renee. “We were both ready to ‘Come on Down’ but they didn’t call us.”

 

Making things are a big part of his day and his life. Last March daughter Renee told him, “it is time for you to get busy living or get busy dying!”  So, he got busy with a collection of wine bottles, a drill, some rebar and made a beautiful fence and gate he named “Heaven’s Gate.” It took 90 bottles. He only broke four drilling. Then he found a windmill and topped it with that.

 

“Restaurants Abuelo’s and Triple J Chophouse saved their wine bottles for me. People are always asking if I will take an order to make one for them. I say, ‘No, but I will give you the instructions,’” he adds.

 

Kenn grew up in Nazareth Texas, a German farming community of 300 about 75 miles northwest of Lubbock. “I had 16 in my high school graduating class. The largest in Nazareth history,” he laughs.

 

Then he was off to Texas Tech for a degree in Animal Husbandry and traveling with his Tech Ag buddies to judge livestock in places like Chicago, Denver and Kansas City. After two years in the army and a year as County Agent in Temple he went to work at JC Penney department store running the men’s department. That is where he met his wife Barbara. “She was a high school student working afternoons in the layaway department. We married in 1958,” he remembers. After 35 years in management with Penney’s, he retired in 1993.

 

Kenn and Barbara have had 18 foreign exchange students living with them. “And, they have come back and visited mom and dad,” Renee says. “And mom and dad traveled the world visiting them – even to the winter and summer Olympics. And, since mom and dad made sure all 18 knew each other some of them would join them on their trips.”

 

Kenn admits that he is not very “tech savvy.” “I can barely make and take calls on my cell.  When telemarketers call me during the day I just say, ‘Sorry, but I didn’t join the 21st Century.’ And I hang up. I feel so blessed to be alive.”