University Reunion Brings Back Youth and Gratefulness

Madison, Wis. – The blurry black and white picture from so long ago, I am standing on a chair in an A-line skirt with the bunched hem held up by a few pins.

          Decades have passed since that photo, probably from Peg’s instammatic camera. Don’t recall ever even seeing the picture before.  Don’t know who was measuring to make sure that hem was even.  Peg has brought a handful of such photos along to share with the rest of us, back for the first time all together again since graduation in 1965 at our alma mater, the University of Wisconsin. Peg and Sue,  I and Shari.  (Shari actually graduated the year before us, but joined us for this 50^th alumni weekend since so much of our life on campus had been spent together).

That picture at our dorm, Slichter Hall.  It records our enthusiasm when we discovered we could make our own A-line skirts. Don’t know where we got the sewing machine but we could have this richness, an entire wardrobe of A-line skirts for so little money, just the cost of material and our own efforts.

The memories flood back. Here we are all together again, only now we all have at least some white hair and wrinkles. Here this blustery fall day for the alumni reunion. I had forgotten how we were back then so long ago.  We were a pack.

And now we were once again.  For one rollicking fall weekend, in the same place where all our hopes and dreams were hatched nearly a lifetime ago.  Somehow, the combination worked its original magic and we were able down the long halls of time, to reach back and touch the girls we had once been.

I get ahead of myself.   Back to the old photos, that one with the skirt.  I am wearing a Norwegian print sweater, machine-made but my pride and joy. Doesn’t go at all with the cotton A-line skirt.  Me with thick darker hair, short and somehow curly before the rest of a lifetime of a bob and straight hair.

More pictures, that was how my hair was curly. A girl with a bonnet hair dryer,  one of the triumvirate of true prizes in the dorms along with a popcorn popper and a typewriter.  No cell phones,  I-pads, laptops or television sets.  We all shared one phone on our floor and you were lucky to have a record player and alarm clock.  I remember the pain, if you didn’t have a hair dryer,  brush rollers poking your head all night long while you tried to sleep.

Like I said, we were a pack. Photos of us everywhere, striking model-like poses next to a tree, girls on the verge of emergence as young women.  Dreamy with so much future ahead of us.

For me, my first time away from home except for a short stint at summer camp. For the first time, I was finding myself without family and all the duties of a much younger brother and working mom and dad. No comparisons like before with an older sister. No nights of babysitting.  The feeling of freedom, all these new friends to make. Both Shari and I had to reform by second semester after our grades suffered from too much socializing.

And now we were back, each of us traveling from afar, me the farthest, the West Coast.   We jump up and down in the hallway at our hotel, the Lowell Center, a former lady’s dorm. Causing a ruckus of noise, squeals of delight at seeing each other after so many years. Sue from Minneapolis, a retired social worker. Shari a ph.d in psychology still working in Pittsburgh. Peg a retired elementary school teacher from a small town near Philadelphia. And me, a retired journalist from Vancouver, Wa.

Excited, we head off to the  main drag, the nearby State Street.  The  first impression, still the same commercial zone of bars and coffee shops and the university bookstore.  But the kids, so young and so many, so concentrated. We order teas and coffee in a shop and sit out in the wind.

The parade of youth before us.  We laugh and laugh at each other’s jokes.  Each recounting their trip here.  The vagaries of plane travel today. Only Sue drove  from her home.  Where the weather is often way worse. I recall a visit eons ago when it was 30 below the morning I left in  my car, worried when the door slammed shut and Sue already off at work. Would my car start?

That was when I told her, “you live in a crapola place.” Innocent words directed not at her home but the climate. It became the catchword among us for the rest of the trip.  That I said she lived in a “crapola place.”

“When I get home, I shall have to send you all pix of my condo,” she says. A cascade of laughter.

The pack is back. We march to Bascom hill, the steep hill that ends in the old center of the campus at  Bascom Hall and the iconic statue of Abraham Lincoln. Graduates now take their picture in his lap.  But we only walk around the bottom of the hill, aching hips and backs, the wind so fierce this October day.  We enter an ancient hall with stained glass windows where on fall afternoons each of us at some point listened to chamber music. I can recall the sense of peace it gave, plus the nearly free extra credits.

But this is just the start of the whirlwind weekend that will pass too soon, a time when place and company help bring back a moment’s taste once again of being young, of being so hopeful. A time of nostalgia. A time when we took for granted having friends, having family, all around us. So much of that, especially primary family, now gone.

We realize the preciousness of our group. In the whole wide world, the four of us together are probably the largest concentration of people who remember each other’s mother. We walk past the University club, the UW band playing inside. The music, State Street, the early darkness and wind. We are back.

The next day, the alumni association has a “day of learning”  which they have had to stage at the newer south union, the main one we knew and loved under major renovation. We assemble with the few hundred other alumni to hear from various departments. How music changed since the 60s, how we can try to get enough fuel for the future, how will we feed the 15 billion people the world is expected to have by midcentury. All bemoan the loss of public funding, but say they reach out and will somehow continue through private donations.

Sitting and listening once again to profs.  Sitting together and taking notes.  Afterwards, we walk to Babcock hall, famous for its dairy plant and single ice cream cone that was actually three whole dips. Hey, this is Wisconsin.  We crowd in where there used to be just one lady to a real store with counter and tables. Order up our cones. Still so good, still so big.

Then onward to our old dorm. This side route is much flatter we all note than marching up from the bottom of Bascom Hill.  Steps matter these days though all four of us are dedicated walkers. A rush of wind and we are at Slichter hall. The same square stone faced building. 

A young man opens the door for us.  Like all the youngsters we met, so polite and willing to talk and help.   He tells us boys live now on one side, girls on the other. All girl when we lived there. The students don’t share bathrooms, he says, much to our sigh of relief. We try to remember what floor and room we were in but memory fails. We do remember though how you could get late minutes and campuses and even get thrown out of school for violations. The necking that would go on at the doorway before those last minutes ticked away. And now the boys and girls live in the same building.

Onward to what used to be the Pine room, cherry cokes and blond brownies of our past. Now a reception area. Then Van Hise dining hall, the same dining hall no more.   We all worked there once, amazing that you could pay for your schooling that way instead of today’s massive debts. We all worked the scrape table, pulling off the dishes and leftover food. The starched pink uniforms we had to wear, how we’d sneak the hems up from around our ankles. The required hairnets and the “W’s” on the plate edge we had to position just so. The hall, now something different, wasn’t open to visit.

Then along the lakeside path.  Choppy waves, the blue Lake Mendota. Stories I recall about a mental home on the other side, bodies that might float up. All just stories.  The lake and adjacent woods are beautiful. We all remark, how lucky we had been. This campus, the opportunity our families gave us. Each of us except Peg the first in our families to graduate from university.

Peg, always gentle, her head down as she moves forward in thought just like before. I always felt safe with her. Even when she took me out in one of the little sailboats they still rent out on Lake Mendota down near the main student union.  I’d never sailed before, didn’t know how to help with the sail when the winds changed. I dodged and somehow we made it safely to shore.

 Sue with her analytic mind. Perfect for a social worker, her life’s job. How we would sit on her bed and parse what someone had said and what it might mean. Shari, always practical and moving forward,  she got us going on the A-line skirts.

Saturday the big game.  We get our picture taken with the UW mascot, Bucky Badger. Heck, he is 75 this year.  Grab up some cheerleader pompoms, the characteristic red and white. A mountain goat climb to our seats. Our delight when the student section does this new tradition, jump around and the entire student section, hundreds of kids in the red and white school colors jump up and down. Our old knees allow some wiggle.  The pompoms help. The man in front of us, another alumni, says I am Medicare, uses our shoulder to hold him up as he goes by. We lose the game, a blunder at one yard from goal, but even so we stand with gusto to sing “Varsity,U rah rah Wisconsin” with the characteristic hand wave at the end.

The next day early we all peel off, back to our respective lives. But Sue says it all for us, “Growing old is not easy but having connection with those people with whom you share a past can help ease the pain.”

So much we shared. So great to touch upon it all again. This sense of gratitude for all we had once and still have.

Vintage Beer, Bronze Fonz Add Nostalgia to Milwaukee Visit

            Milwaukee, Wisconsin -- the city once famous for its beer-- has come full circle. Not only is the original Schlitz now available but Pabst, too, will soon be back on tap here with its vintage  recipe.  Full bodied brews that put later production in the 70’s to shame, those weaker looking beers that led to sales slumps and years of  brewery closings, takeovers and mergers.

The decision to bring back the two beers here, at least in token amounts, to me is emblematic of what I found on my recent visit to the Wisconsin city where I lived and worked some 40 years before.  I was delighted at how Milwaukee has embraced its history and resources, transforming its downtown area into a vibrant commercial and recreational hub. 

Talk about nostalgia. The city built a nearly three-mile RiverWalk along the Milwaukee River complete with a “bronze Fonz,” the life-sized statue of the Milwaukee-based Happy Days character that was portrayed on television by Henry Winkler.

Back to the beers.  The Schlitz original brew is served, $2 a pint, all day every day, at the Brown Bottle, north of downtown in the former Schlitz brewery complex, now largely used for offices.  Only one major brewery, MillerCoors, itself a merger,  remains in the city.   But many of the old brands, including Schlitz and Pabst are now owned by Blue Ribbon Intermediate Holdings, headquartered in Los Angeles.  It contracted with Miller-Coors to brew the original Schlitz.

By summer 2016, Blue Ribbon plans itself to microbrew its original Pabst Blue Ribbon beer right in Milwaukee, at the site of its former brewery on the west side of downtown.  The company also plans a tasting room there.

The new Pabst facility will join numerous other microbreweries already in the Milwaukee area.  On my visit, I went to the Lakefront Brewery, www.lakefrontbrewery.com, just north of the downtown in what is called the Beerline neighborhood. It is named for the fact that breweries used to have their supplies shipped there along the Milwaukee River. The area is now a vibrant urban development of condos, apartments and businesses, flanked by the start of the RiverWalk.

 Lakefront, which dates to the 80s, helped lead the way to Milwaukee also becoming a microbrew beer town. Housed in a former power building for streetcars, it is known for its fun tour, where visitors for a small fee receive four tokens, for four samples. My favorite was the eastside dark. But then amber and pumpkin were also good.

New-old Milwaukee by this time had me captivated. I remember back in the 70s toasting in Christmas at one of the breweries in an old wood paneled room with longtime Mayor Henry Maier. Want more nostalgia from beer town?

Take in like I did one of the Milwaukee food and city tours, www.MilwaukeeFoodTours.com. I went on the Old World Third Street tour along the RiverWalk.  We enjoyed authentic German food tastings at places like Mader’s restaurant, try spaetzle and sauerbraten, as well as stopping at a saloon with the longest bar east of the Mississippi, cheese tastings and a late night visit to the Fonz. The gold tinted statue is short, five feet six inches, the same as Winkler. Even in darkness, its nose was shiny from all the good luck rubbings from visitors. Arthur “the Fonz” Fonzarelli from the sit-com based in the 50s era in Milwaukee. The show ran from 1974 to 1984. A public campaign raised the $85,000 to erect the statue which was dedicated with Winkler present in 2008.

  The RiverWalk is festooned in good weather with flowers and plantings in pots, lots of benches and tables and places to sit and enjoy the river scene. The walk goes all the way down into the former warehouse area, the Third Ward, now home to a public market, chic shops and high rise apartments.

            You want even more nostalgia. Try the Pabst mansion, farther to the west near Marquette University. www.pabstmansion.com.The Flemish renaissance revival mansion was one of several owned by prominent industrialists of the late 19^th century back in the so called Gilded Age when Wisconsin Avenue was known as Grand Avenue.  The stately home, built in 1892 for the Pabst family and decorated in historical furnishings, was subsequently owned from 1908 to 1975 by the Milwaukee archdiocese. It was set for the wrecking ball to make way for a parking lot until it was saved and taken over by the not-for-profit Wisconsin Heritages, Inc.

          

  The heavy drapes, rococo Victorian insides with a fireplace in every room despite central heating (to prove Pabst could afford luxury), take you back into the 19^th century. Family portraits throughout add a haunting feeling to the rooms.

            I rounded out my brief visit to the city with a performance of Dream Girls at the Milwaukee Repertory theatre, www.milwaukeerep.com.  The city also offers a full performing arts center and numerous other theater and museum venues. Old and new Milwaukee, all so centrally located and accessible, I will have to return if only to taste that original Pabst.

For more information, see www.visitmilwaukee.org

New Orleans After Katrina

(Editor's Note: I wrote this some time ago but wanted to share it now because I think it encapsulates a lot of the reason that New Orleans has been able to rise out of the wreckage of the hurricane 10 years ago. Whatever the controversy over whether the poor have come back as much as the rest of the city, there is still hope with the kind of spirit I feel I found there.)

The minute I landed, I knew I’d found the right place.   New Orleans.  Always on my bucket list but a dog leg away from the Pacific Northwest and this the first time I was visiting.  Took eight hours to fly there, no easy routes available and I had to change planes in Chicago.   Worth it after a rainy cold spring back home. The air was sultry with warm humidity, the smell of magnolias and other trees in bloom.  There was a balm to New Orleans that loosened my bones.  “Lagniappe,” the little extra the Big Easy promises.

 It was midnight, midweek, but the French Quarter, the oldest part of the city, was alive.  No Starbucks and rolled up sidewalks here.  The crowds, both tourist and local, spilled for blocks into Bourbon and Royal’s cobbled streets. Mardi Gras was weeks past but spring break brought out the young men and women, their fists tight around neon green foot-high drinks and “huge ass beers.”

 A man pounded on his baby grand piano with neon-lit keys, his dark head pumping with the rhythm.  The surprise was how he got there in the middle of the street. The piano sat on plump tires, the whole contraption attached to his bicycle in front.   Down the way, a young Vietnamese woman serenaded with her electric violin. On another corner, a clarinetist wailed with her Dixie band.

 Two strippers with long pink wigs and no shirts strolled along, their bare breasts exposed.  On a nearby balcony, young men dangled shiny beads at a passerby to try to get her to lift her shirt, a tradition born out of Mardi Gras.  She complied.

 Now, you may not like the college frat atmosphere of the quarter, the oldest and highest part of the city that wasn’t hit by Hurricane Katrina and the levee breaches that inundated the rest of the city.  But, you have to appreciate the laid-back tolerance New Orleans has for this kind of going on.  The next morning, early, the crews were out hosing down the place and picking up the trash.

 Tourism, which is back bigger than pre-Katrina, provides the city with major revenue, surpassed only by its port on the Mississippi River. On my visit, I still saw empty lots and some wrecked buildings in other parts of the city but it was mostly recovered, thanks in part to efforts led by actor Brad Pitt and musician Harry Connick Jr.  The brightly colored new homes were built on stilts to avoid any future flooding.

The tolerance I sensed, I believe, was driven by something more than revenue, maybe that “lagniappe” attitude that grows out of the long history of Spanish and French roots.  A gentler approach to what it means to be human, a grace in wanting to take time and enjoy the moment.  An expansion of the attitude in the Northwest that leads some to take a day off when the sun shines.

The young women, more voluptuous than their Northwest counterparts, flashed lots of tattoos and cleavage but almost always set off by some black lace, at the bodice or the trim on the leggings worn under short, flouncy skirts. I saw an entire elevator full of women off to a bachelorette party wearing chartreuse, orange and pink net tutus around their hips.

 New Orleans folk,  I learned, make a big deal out of what they eat.  “First rule,” one woman told me. “You must never go away from here hungry.” Add crawfish to their sea harvest of oysters and shrimp.  And celebrate pork -- pulled, barbecued and king on the menu. One of the leading restaurants was fittingly called Cochon.  I tasted pork face, which an earnest young waiter explained was the face peeled from the bone and left in the air to cure. It was delicious. Then, of course, there were all the famous Brennan restaurants, the originators of Bananas Foster.  Dickie Brennan, one of the many children of the founding family, had just opened a new restaurant called the Tableau in the quarter.

 Used to be folk would say while in New Orleans, you better order a Bloody Mary because the garnish was the only vegetables you’d get on your trip. But the chefs have changed with the times.  Almost as ubiquitous as pork and seafood was a side of shaved raw Brussels sprouts, albeit often with a sprinkle of bacon bits.

Coffee. There was an occasional Starbucks but more often, local outfits like the famous Café du Monde down by the river which featured coffee made with chicory and its slight bitterness.  Lines stretched around the place, open 24 hours a day, everyone waiting for the deep fried powdered sugar covered treat known as beignets. The floor around the tiny café tables was sprinkled white, along with the fronts of most customers.

 A must visit was Preservation Hall.   Can’t think of anywhere else to match it. The ancient little room in the French quarter was dark inside with just two overhead lights and benches for the audience.  Old fashioned. No amplification, no air-conditioning. Just the intimate experience of listening to the heartfelt playing of traditional jazz. The night I was there, the line of elderly black musicians clothed in white shirts and dark pants marched in to their seats and began their songs. Yes, they were so old they had to sit most of the time, except when the music got so hot they stood up. The lead trombonist, who had to weigh 400 pounds, rose, sweating from his chair and a la Louie Armstrong spread his arms and sang, “Take all of me.”

The city’s embrace of life extended all the way to their dead, buried in raised graves in cemeteries all over the city. When I couldn’t find my guide at a cemetery up in the elegant  garden district, the volunteer at the wrought iron gate said he’d fill me in. Uncanny.  The plump little man with a neat white beard wore a tee shirt stating he was against the death penalty.

  He wanted to share how the graves, dating to yellow fever times in the 19^th century, were built with a hole inside toward the back so they could be continually used by families. The graves turn into ovens during the long hot summers, reaching 200 degrees, like a crematorium, he explained. When the next family member needs burial,  the cemetery uses a big shovel and pushed the old remains to the back where they fall in the hole. Then they roll in the next one.

Back to the living. I can think of no finer place to mingle with the locals in New Orleans than the Mid-City Lanes Rock ‘N Bowl.   Last bowling alley I went to down in Portland in the Hollywood district went out of business. But the rock ‘n bowl and their Thursday night zydeco was going strong.  The musicians and their squeeze box concertina kept the dancers stomping while nearby you heard the crack of bowling balls hitting pins in the several lanes. 

Four glorious days of sunshine and temperatures in the 70s soothed my early springtime angst over the Northwest’s cold and rainy days.  It rained in New Orleans, but not until the morning I left. I took solace in the promise of even more abandon when I got home.  In my luggage, I had half a dozen sweet pralines from the French Market.

Getting There Anymore Ain't Half the Fun

     Flying has become a whole new experience, I learned recently as I returned to airline trips after a several-year hiatus.  And, as all of you know, the changes haven’t been pretty. The seats are so tightly jammed in that the person in front of me at times practically pitches back into my lap. Middle seats are never left empty anymore. On one of my flights, the person to my left in such a seat managed somehow to turn so his back was to me while he gobbled an eight dollar airplane sandwich (sticky white bread, wilted lettuce and some kind of meat).  He had to be starving to eat something like that with such relish. No doubt he missed a meal or two thanks to the long lines with TSA before boarding.

 The only food in front of me was the small packet of pretzels and plastic glass of diet coke that I’d received for free. I was not about to fork over good money for airline food.   People told me later I was lucky to receive even that.  Then there is the sound of the plane. Once we were up high and cruising, the engine noises became an all-consuming backdrop. Turns out, my hearing aids added to the cacophony.  I could turn them off. But they somehow added this layer at the top of the sound that I finally decided resembled a heavenly chorus. 

On second thought, that was something I wasn’t ready to meet. Not yet.   I scrunched my shoulder against the hard plastic of the wall around the window and tried to concentrate on the big sky outside. Little frissons of frost were forming on the pane.  The same thought kept occurring to me. We shouldn’t be up here this high.  The ups and downs of the sounds. Maybe it really was a holy chorus of some sort.

The crowds, the hunger, the noises, the bumping along, it all set me to thinking of earlier better times for airline travel.  Like my first trip ever by air. 1962 and it was special.  I was all of 18 and on the way from the Midwest to the West Coast to spend the summer with my favorite grandfather.   My old Polish grandfather, John Isidore Romer, almost 80 and no longer able to make the airline trip to see us  like he used to, carrying a brown sack filled with chicken he’d fried especially for us, grease marks blotting through onto the paper.

 That trip to see him was my first time out on my own, an adult. I dressed in the only way acceptable for a young lady of those times: garter belt to hold up nylon hose, little black leather pumps, a blue pleated skirt and a proper box style jacket and blouse.  Dressed up as much as for a dance, dressed up like I could go to church.

We had to go out on the tarmac at Billy Mitchell field in Milwaukee and climb up the aluminum stairs to enter the big Northwest airlines jet.  I remember feeling like I was getting into a rocket. The idea that we would shoot into the air and traverse half the nation in a few hours.  I was most excited to see the city and then farmland finally give way to the view from the tiny porthole next to my seat, yes, I got a window seat, of the vast Mississippi River flowing some 37,000 feet below me. A year of studying geography my first year in college, I was excited to share with the lady on the aisle, the one removed from me by the vacant middle seat, what I knew of the river’s course. 

Little stars of frost on the window.  The wonder of it all, cruising along at 600 miles an hour.  Then meals, okay I don’t recall even what we ate, but I know there were full trays of food served by bouncy young stewardesses dressed in uniforms that looked like the suits women wore in old movies.

                                                                                                               

Then dozing a bit and finally, lowering over the Portland, Or.,  area, Mount Hood in the background and the plane following the Columbia River. We bumped along, my excitement growing.  My uncle was in the terminal, waiting for me.  No big security. My suitcase, a square beige bag I borrowed from mom,  coming around the conveyor belt, no extra charge.

The wonder of it all, the feeling I was now a real adult, setting off on a life, albeit still with relatives watching over me, but setting flight as it were. A nestling on her first flight.

There was romance to it all.  A romance that is so long gone.   The population of the world has doubled in the last 40 years and what used to be a big occasion is now commonplace for so many more people flying.  Maybe that is why our airliners have come to feel more like trips by Greyhound bus than luxury voyages.

No wonder the airlines have compartmentalized it all, to move so many more of us along in this cattle call.  That was the other thought that struck me on my return to air travel.  We now get into little boxes to complete this uncomfortable transition of getting from point “a” to point “b” with the speed of air travel.

The first big box is the air terminal. In many places it is so large you have to transition by getting into some smaller box, like an interior train as they have at SeaTac, to get from one concourse to another. Once you finally find the part of the airport where you wait for your plane, you are finally jostled forward past the ticket agents to board. Of course, that is another box. The big rectangular tube with accordion pleats that gets you into the airplane.

You enter the long silver tube of the aircraft.  As many of you as can fit. You still bounce around in this rocket for hours, blasting out a gazillion bits of carbon dioxide.  Only the impact is so much worse, given the number of flights.  Some estimates say by the middle of the 21^st century airline travel will account for 15 percent of global warming.

And when you arrive, you don’t get out on the tarmac, you unfold in the long exit, row by row, so many jammed in with their carry-ons smashing into people’s heads.  And through the folding exit box back into the big box of the terminal.

Yes, it is a wonder to travel so far so fast. But the romance of getting there is long long gone.

Danger in Animal Parks

The recent death of a tourist in a South African lion park brings home the dangers in visiting wild animals in their home.  On my safari in Tanzania with Overseas Adventure Travel, the guides we traveled with more than once reminded us of this fact.  It is too easy to become blase, surrounded by so many animals.  Until things get dicey.

Our group traveled in converted four by four pickups, high enough off the ground that you had to pull yourself up the few steps to enter. Once inside, we were able to stand on the seats to photograph out the pop-up roof which also served as a good sunshade.  (See photo in Serengeti blog entry).

We were never admonished not to open our sliding windows but they were so high nothing could enter.   At one point, we were in the bush, moving closer to two elephants, busy foraging among trees, stripping leaves off branches with their trunks.   We moved closer and the elephant nearer to us turned toward us, looking menacing.   Our guide warned us all in low voice to keep quiet. Elephants are known for unpredicatability.  We stopped our chatter and photo taking and waited. After a bit, the elephant turned back to his task and we slowly pulled away.

The guide later shared with us that he had seen a large elephant charge a more open jeep once, his tusk piercing right through the metal of the vehicle.  Happily, there was no one sitting there.

Even worse, one time in an open jeep, the safari group was watching a lion chasing a leopard. The leopard decided a leap would be a fast getaway and it jumped into the jeep, landing on the floor.  Everyone froze, including the leopard. The lion left and the leopard leapt out.  There was more than one wet seat in the jeep, the guide said.

Just weeks before my safari, our guide said a guide friend of his was gored so badly he was left paralyzed. He was at a camp, attending to one of the vehicles and had not seen the Cape buffalo that charged him.

JFK Memorial Provides Emotional Trip Through Time

When I knew I was going to travel to the Dallas area, I thought why not stop in at the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, the site of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  After all, I had lived through those turbulent times in the early 1960s.

Historic visit, so I thought. Just a tragic curiosity now.  It all happened so long ago.  Boy, was I in for an emotional surprise.

The downtown museum is housed in the very building, a turn of the twentieth century brick warehouse,  from which Lee Harvey Oswald is accused of shooting the president.  The museum occupies the top sixth and seventh floors of the former Texas School Book Depository, the rest of the floors occupied by local government offices .  The permanent exhibit examines the life, death and legacy of the president through hundreds of photos, films and artifacts. 

The crowd the day I visited on a holiday weekend was thick.  Young couples, teen-agers, children all eager to soak up the history.  There were the iconic photos, John-John under the president's desk, Jackie looking so glamorous at a state dinner, JFK himself, tall, handsome with his shock of red hair and big smile.   The now naive looking campaign posters and buttons. None of the glitz of the internet age.  Still, all the drama of race riots, the cold war and the Cuban missile crisis unfolding before us with flickering black and white films and photos.

But, nothing prepared me for the shock I felt when I got to the sniper's perch next to the sixth floor window from which Oswald is said to have shot.  The corner is enclosed in glass, the boxes of books stacked strategically to provide cover. The original rough wood flooring is still intact.  I could imagine Oswald, himself assassinated shortly after being arrested, crouched at the window with his rifle, the very rifle displayed in another glass case nearby.

That I could be standing there, where but for time and space I could be witnessing this infamous act. I felt myself gasp, the hairs on my arm rise.  My own history. I remembered that day Nov. 22, 1963. I was an exchange student in France.  Kennedy the image of hope and youth.  The news of his death, it felt like the bullet had gone through my heart.  Then, the fear.  What could this mean, especially for people like me living abroad? This urge to want to go home.

My indignation at not being able to find a copy of the International Herald newspaper, all sold out.  The rumors that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had also been shot.  All the turmoil.  But, in the end a peaceful passage of power. Still, all the mourning, the grief.  The loss. That is what came back to me standing there, looking at that sniper's perch.

From an adjacent bank of windows, you could look down at the place where JFK's motorcade had passed on a campaign visit to Dallas.  The big white "x" marks the exact spot where he was hit.

All that hope shattered in a moment.  And, all the controversy that followed.  The museum also houses the actual 10 by 10 foot model of Dealey Plaza prepared by the FBI for the Warren Commission in 1964. It ruled that Oswald was the lone assailant but that has never stopped the conjecture that followed.

Near the white "x" outside the museum, you will find all the conspiracy proponents who gather to this day to debate who exactly killed Kennedy.

The museum, which is run by the non-profit Dallas County Historical Foundation, presents all the theories but takes no position, seeing its mission as being an impartial forum to explore the memory and effects of the event.

All the conjecture. I didn't take the time to study it all, figuring no one will ever fully resolve the matter. But, one thing stood out for me as a result of my visit.  The horrific event marked the end of at least part of American innocence.