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The Home Stretch |
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It seems like only yesterday that my world held limitless possibilities. I was five and we lived a block from the ocean at Indialantic, Florida. I had a lot of time on my hands while my older brother Bob was in school. I wandered along the sands listening to the surf and the cry of the gulls and imagined that I would one day see what was on the other side of that great undulating ocean. My world suddenly expanded exponentially when I started to school and learned to read. What an amazing power for a small child to possess! My horizons expanded with new people and places tumbling off the pages! I became fascinated by distant lands and cultures. World War II opened my mind even more to distant places and events. As a kid in Ft. Lauderdale I yelled headlines and sold the afternoon newspaper on the streets where I met Wall Street Bankers, charter fishing boat skippers, local folk of all sorts, and many sailors, soldiers, and marines freshly returned from combat overseas. The world with all of its good, bad, and ugliness was right there to absorb, and absorb it I did. Through high school the years just couldn’t pass quickly enough. I was chomping at the bits to leave the nest and take on the world on my terms. I left school in my junior year at Benton High and crossed the continent twice in my sixteenth year. First I spent some time in Miami working in a fishery unloading and packing fish and lobster for the restaurant trade. Next I made my way to Marine Corps boot camp in San Diego where I learned how to kill people and blow things up. My sixteenth year was a sobering one. The Marine Corps sent me packing when they discovered my tender age. I took a three month breather to think things over and joined the Air Force on my seventeenth birthday. At Barksdale Air Force Base I worked on the flight line on B-29 bombers elbow to elbow with the mechanics that serviced these giant war birds on Guam, Saipan, and Tinian and met some of the bomber crews who rained death and destruction down from the skies upon the cities of our former Japanese enemies. Now it was my turn to keep these sleek silver beasts ready for combat should a need arise. I suddenly realized I had just arrived at the starting line of life. A wide open and unpredictable road lay ahead. I tried to make sober choices. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I didn’t. At eighteen I found myself in a seriously responsible position. A fresh graduate of the Jet Fighter maintenance school I was assigned as ground crew chief of an F-86 saber interceptor in Air Defense Command. It was my job to keep an airplane ready for combat against Soviet nuclear-armed bombers which might seek to destroy New York City, and to keep a young Air Force officer and pilot alive so he could defend the country if called upon. There is nothing in the world that will focus one’s attention more acutely than that sort of responsibility. Travel, adventure, and meeting new people was always exciting, but many of us in the military regardless of our rank aspired to become a “PFC” once again, a “proud, fine, civilian.” Returning to civilian life I suddenly realized I was still at the starting line. Much preparation lay ahead. Marriage, college, launching a teaching career, and going to graduate school all came in their turn. Now at last I was off the starting line and moving along life’s path. Years came and went. We made adjustments to our careers. We traveled and visited widely dispersed family members and took in the sights along the way. We watched as the nephews and nieces grew up and generated their own families. Having no children of our own we never experienced that very effective measuring device available in a home with growing children who show you that you are in fact getting older. Somehow we just didn’t think of ourselves as aging. Then it happened. We retired! Now there’s a milestone! We often tell young people, “Don’t blink or you’ll miss something.” To “twenty somethings” it seems absurd that we too were “twenty” just a few days back. The years rolled by oh so quickly. Following retirement we changed locations twice before moving to Conway. Each change was accompanied by massive downsizing. We managed to dispose of what seemed like tons of furniture, books, file folders, obsolete equipment and things we asked ourselves the age old question, “Why on earth have we kept this all these years?” Each time we relocated we did not forget, but kept the most important thing of all, that for which there is no replacement, good friends! Now we are in the home stretch. Whether it will be long or short we only know that we have run the course to the present and still have things to do before we cross the finish line. We thank our eternal creator for the lives we have lived and for the lives with which we may yet be blessed. We face the question of what to leave behind when we are no longer able to make a difference. Our days are spent sorting priorities and acting on those over which we still have some control. One of our goals is to leave the family some knowledge of their origins and a record of our mutual ancestral accomplishments, along with, we hope, a desire to know more. We have precious little information on hand, but such that we have we want to disseminate widely. This will include all that we have of our genealogy, and a collection of writings and photos reaching into the past as far as possible. We have come to realize why the “old folks” in the family always seemed to talk about the past. It is what they knew best. This is our home stretch. We spend our time assembling material in the form of albums, CD’s, DVD’s, and printed matter hoping that it will fascinate, enlighten and entertain future generations and perhaps stimulate a desire to know more. This will be the inheritance of our younger generations. All people in all generations are but links in a very long a chain of human knowledge and culture. Our civilization may seem disconnected with the past but a careful examination will reveal that our current institutions are direct evolutionary extensions of our Greco-Roman heritage. In religion, politics, economics, engineering, and science we are the direct cultural descendants of Greek and Roman civilization. We need to study the whole past in order to understand who we are and from whence we came in order to gain some feeling for where our civilization may be headed next. To do less will leave us without a cultural compass. A population that neglects learning is separated but by a single generation from chaos and barbarism. Physical monuments of the ancient world may crumble into dust, but knowledge which flows from generation to generation sustains us now and will sustain future generations if they but allow it to do so. This is the true meaning and spirit of History.
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