My father was four when he went blind from glaucoma. When he was five, his father, who was a farmer, died. His mother remarried and left the farm to run a gas station in Lapway, Idaho, on the reservation of the Nez Perce Indians. Little Charlie Collins was sent away to the special school in Boise where they sent broken and deformed children to teach them how to live with their unfulfilled dreams, and there his wanderer's life began.