Has anyone seen my old friend...

Yesterday marked 43 years since two college friends and I stood on a sharply cold and clear morning in Washington  , D.C. watching John Kennedy’s funeral procession. We had hitchhiked to DC the day before and dragged ourselves out of bed well before dawn to get downtown early enough to get a good spot where we would be able to see the procession. I wish I could tell you that I was introspective enough at the time to understand what a momentous time that was but that would be a bit of a stretch.  How could we have imagined that within 5 years two more bullets would punctuate the death of a dream some called Camelot? 

Perhaps that memory is part of the reason that I couldn’t sit through the last moments of the movie “Bobby” when I went to see it Saturday night. The movie was just too real. The sixties, although I never got arrested or tear gassed or anything, were just too much a part of the fabric of my life. I couldn’t make myself sit through a re-creation of one of those punctuating deaths. I couldn’t watch the dream die again.

Returning to Charlottesville that Sunday night we caught a ride with Mutual News radio reporter, Joe Campbell. I'll never forget the comment he kept repeating. "He was just so damn young!"

All of them were.