Doug was an enormous country music fan. He considered himself a country boy. He often talked about the days he spent on his grandfather's farm with the animals and how that experience soured him to hunting after locking eyes with a deer he never shot. Shortly thereafter he became a fisherman because according to him it "evened out the odds for the animal."
In the video above Merle Haggard sings about taking his son (Dan) fishing while he's young because time slips by so fast before children become adults and move away. This was all too much of the case with Douglas. He loved all of his children and when they grew up and made families of their own he loved them too and he also found kids in his neighborhood to mentor. Some of the neighborhood kids were at his funeral and they shed just as many tears as his immediate family.
Family life had to be undoubtedly hard in the 30's and 40's because Doug considered a person doing alright if they "weren't cold, they weren't wet and they weren't hungry," as noted in Willie Nelson's Good Times:
Anything beyond that was just icing on the cake. Doug would recall some of the struggles that people had to endure during the Great Depression and the civil rights movement and would mention Sam Cooke's A Change is Gonna Come as the iconic song that epitomized the struggle and hope of a people.
Doug traveled the world in his lifetime and saw the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, the Great Depression and countless recessions, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination of a US President and a senator, the fall of Apartheid, the invasion of Kuwait and the Middle East Wars, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the end to the Cold War, the end of Communism, the end of the Soviet Union, the rise of the Bush doctrine and America's first Black president. During his seventy-eight plus years Doug saw plenty of change that had come.
And even with witness to these and other evolving world events Doug held fast to the beliefs that "the more things change the more they stay the same," and "there's nothing new under the sun." He was and is an eternal Highwayman:
