March 30, 2005 – Much to be Thankful For

March 30, 2005 – Much to be Thankful For

In the year our oldest daughter ME was born, the United States saw such public carnage as to make a nation weep. Before her second month of birth, ME’s young world saw the assassination of Martin Luther King at the black-owned Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. After a week of calm, all hell broke loose across the country as blacks rioted in major cities, including Washington DC. Time magazine for the week of April 19th report 5,117 fires, 1,928 homes and shops wrecked or ransacked, and 23,987 arrests throughout the nation. I was working two jobs at the time, one during the day at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and a second evening job at Montgomery Ward Department story in (TK), troubleshooting newly delivered television sets that failed to operate when shipped to customers.

When we thought some calm had been restored, another assassination shocked our psyche again. Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, presidential candidate and Democrat Senator from New York, Robert Kennedy was gunned down in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles by a young Palestinian Sirhan B. Sirhan. Life as depicted in the evening news was becoming some bad thriller where the villain kept up this relentless pace of one frightening, nerve-racking atrocity after another and the viewer is left powerless to do anything about it. ME participated in the national grief, young and completely unaware as she was. On June 8th the 21-car funeral train carrying Robert Kennedy’s body from New York City, left Penn Station, en route to Union Station in Washington D.C. Four hours behind schedule, the train passed through Landover, Maryland and ME, my wife IM and me along with nearly everyone else in Landover, stood beside the track and paid our respects. The slain Senator’s body was in the last car.

The nation would endure one more shock on Sunday August 25th as rioting broke out at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. This was a spectacle My wife IM and I watched on our Black & White Montgomery Wards 19-in. television set in our apartment. By then ME had begun to scoot herself around our apartment in a walker. Between crawling and her walker, she had the run of the apartment and largely ignored IM and me as we watched the evening news for the latest developments in the riots and the outcome of the Democratic National Convention proceedings. ME thumb in mouth was a content little soul, with not a care in the world.

That fall, with ME now growing by leaps and bounds, the three of us explored Washington DC nearly every weekend, visiting most of the national monuments. There are pictures of ME at the Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson monuments, ME beside the reflecting pool, and ME before the National Air and Space Museum of Smithsonian. During the week I looked for employment, some way to get us back further west. One day in September I came across an employment ad for Collins Radio Company in Dallas, Texas. They needed technical writers and I applied. I did the initial interview and got a second one in Dallas. I flew out for the day landing at Love Field, then the major airport for the city. After spending a day at the Collins Radio facility on Arapaho Road, near the northern end of Richardson, Texas, I ended up with the job. Collins was going to move the three of us from Landover to Dallas.

In early October, a moving van came to our apartment and took what few large belongings we had acquired, loaded them up and headed for Dallas. ME, IM and me loaded up our two-door 1967 Buick Regal and headed southwest. It was the most enjoyable trip we ever made. ME was one of those babies you could take anywhere and she never complained. We stayed in Holiday Inns all along the way, stopping every 400 miles or so for the day. We started out on Interstate 66 and traveled to Interstate 81 south through Virginia to Knoxville, Tennessee, our first stop. The next day we drove the length of Tennessee exchanging Interstate 81 for Interstate 40 and ending up in Memphis. It was early afternoon when we stopped and we lounged about the motel waiting for dinner. From Memphis, we made our way through Little Rock, exchanging Interstate 40 for Interstate 30, which took us into Dallas. On arriving in Dallas, we spent the night at the Holiday Inn on the North Central Expressway—the fanciest of motels we had visited.

Our year and a half in Maryland was over. The nation had gone through a great social upheaval and it was hungry for something new. The nation elected Richard Nixon, ending a decade of rule by the Democrats. The great leaders for civil rights reform were buried. The leaders of the student revolt—the Chicago 8—were found guilty and sentence to prison and the nation seemed to have settled down and come to terms with its new self. The new president would extricate the nation from Viet Nam and the country would go back to being its self-indulgent self once more.

Thanksgiving 1968, just over a month after arriving in Dallas, we drove through rain, snow and icy roads the 600 miles from Dallas to El Paso to introduce ME to her grandparents and three aunties. She was an instant hit, though she was initially afraid of her grandfather. It was a Thanksgiving we had much to be thankful for.