Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco, California on March 26, 1874 to William Prescott Frost, Jr. (a teacher-turned-journalist) and Isabelle Moodie Frost, a Scottish immigrant. He was 11 years old when his father (an alcoholic) died of tuberculosis, leaving the family with just eight dollars. His mother then moved with Robert and his little sister Jeanie to her husband's hometown of Lawrence, Massachusetts where they lived with his parents, and Isabelle found work as a teacher. A top student, Robert graduated from high school in 1892 as class co-valedictorian with Elinor White, to whom he soon after became engaged. He attended Dartmouth College for only two months, long enough to be accepted into the fraternity. He attended Harvard University but left before the end of his second year. Though he felt his true calling was to be a poet, he worked various jobs during his late teens and early twenties (newspaper delivery, arc light carbon filament changer in a factory, a mill hand, a teacher at his mother's school, etc.) -- jobs he did not enjoy but they helped pay the bills. Robert published his first poem while he was still in high school in the school's magazine, and later sold his first poem in 1894 for $15 (equivalent to at least $300 today) to a New York weekly publication, The Independent. He and Elinor married on December 19, 1895 and they had six children together. In 1900, Robert's grandfather, William Frost, Sr. purchased a poultry farm for Robert and Elinor in Derry, New Hampshire with the stipulation that they work the farm for ten years before ownership transferred to them. Additionally, when William passed away in 1901, he left the couple with a yearly annuity of $500.00 (a substantial amount at the time)

Robert worked diligently at both farming and writing poetry for those first five years, and in the last five, he found it financially necessary to also work teaching school. Discouraged that he was almost 40 years old and had not published a single book of poems, he sold the farm in 1911 and moved his family to London, England in 1912 where publishers were more receptive to new talent. While there, he made friends with several literary people, who were influential in publishing his first two manuscripts. With this start and his growing popularity abroad, the Frosts returned to America in 1915 at the outbreak of World War I and purchased a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire. He continued to pursue his literary career as a poet and playwright, focusing on rural life in New England in the early 20th Century with complex social and philosophical themes. Robert soon found himself besieged by magazines seeking to publish his poems. Never before had an American poet achieved such rapid fame after such a disheartening delay. However, income from his poetry and the farm was inadequate to support his family, so he supplemented by heavy lecture and poetry reading schedules. He also taught literary classes part-time at Amherst College and at the University of Michigan from 1916 to 1938 and later served as a poet-in-residence at Harvard (1939-43), Dartmouth (1943-49) and Amherst College (1949-63). He gathered worldwide honors and awards, including four Pulitzer prizes. He was the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (1958-59), and his recital of his poem, "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961 was a memorable occasion.

Despite Robert Frost's literary fame, his personal life was filled with many family tragedies, including the deaths of four of his six children (three in infancy and a son to suicide in 1940); the loss his mother to cancer in 1900; the committing of his sister Jeanie to a mental hospital in 1947 (where she died nine years later); Elinor's developing breast cancer in 1937 and death of heart failure in 1938. None of these traumatic experiences found their way directly into Frost's poetry, and he did not see his art as a form of therapy although inevitably they worked to shape and color the views of life's possibilities and its limits. Robert Frost died in Boston, Massachusetts on January 29, 1963 of complications from prostate surgery, eight weeks short of his 89th birthday. Robert Frost once said, "In three words, I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on."

In ancient Israel, it came to pass that a trader by the name of Abraham Com did take unto himself a young wife by the name of Dot. And Dot Com was a comely woman, broad of shoulder and long of leg. Indeed, she was often called Amazon Dot Com.

And she said unto Abraham, her husband, "Why dost thou travel so far from town to town with thy goods when thou canst trade without ever leaving thy tent?" And Abraham did look at her as though she were several saddle bags short of a camel load, but simply said, "How, dear?"

And Dot replied, "I will place drums in all the town and drums in between to send messages saying what you have for sale, and they will reply telling you who hath the best price. And the sale can be made on the drums and delivery made by Uriah's Pony Stable (UPS).

Abraham thought long and decided he would let Dot have her way with the drums. And the drums rang out and were an immediate success. Abraham sold all the goods he had at the top price, without ever having to move from his tent. To prevent neighboring countries from overhearing what the drums were saying, Dot devised a system that only she and the drummers knew. It was known as Must Send Drum Over Sound (MSDOS), and she also developed a language to transmit ideas and pictures - Hebrew To The People (HTTP).

And the young men did take to Dot Com's trading as doth the bee take to honey pot. They were called Nomadic Ecclesiastical Rich Dominical Sybarites, or NERDS.

And lo, the land was so feverish with joy at the new riches and the deafening sound of drums that no one noticed that the real riches were going to that enterprising drum dealer, Brother William of Gates, who bought off every drum maker in the land. And indeed did insist on drums to be made that would work only with Brother Gates' drumheads and drumsticks.

And Dot did say, "Oh, Abraham, what we have started is being taken over by others." And Abraham looked out over the Bay of Ezekiel, or eBay as it came to be known. He said, "We need a name that reflects what we are."

And Dot replied, "Young Ambitious Hebrew Owner Operators." "YAHOO," SAID Abraham. And because was it Dot's idea, they named it YAHOO Dot Com.

Abraham's cousin, Joshua, being the young Gregarious Energetic Educated Kid (GEEK) that he was, soon started using Dot's drums to locate things around the countryside. It soon became known as God's Own Official Guide to Locating Everything (GOOGLE).

That is how it all began. And that's the truth.

-- Contributed by Russ Newman, Sturtevant, WI