MILEPOST #8

DISCOVERING A LIFELONG PASSION

OK, I admit I could be off by a year one way or the other.  In 1965, my family made our annual pilgrimage from suburban Detroit to Alabama to see my Grandma Howard.  She was a good woman, but seemed rather backward to an eight year old who had grown up in the boom town that was Detroit in the 1960s.  She never had much and was living with another elderly lady we called Aunt Willie.  I don't know how or even if I was related to Aunt Willie.  I do know Aunt Willie didn't have indoor plumbing.  I'm pretty sure I set the 10-and-under world record for the most consecutive days of voluntary bowel movement abstinence.  Almost as bad, was the lack of meat on the supper table.  The grown ups were fine with garden grown vegetables, if one can believe something so absurd.  My brother Kevin ate Spaghetti-Os and I had Hormel Chili by the can.  Not a really great choice when combined with the plumbing issues.   

Grandma and Aunt Willie also had no television.  My mother, sympathetic to our boredom, took Kevin and me to the local five and dime to buy us something to occupy our time.  I don't remember what Kevin picked out, but I got a book entitled "Heroes in Blue and Gray" by Robert E. Alter.  I think it was the first book I ever owned that was about the text, not the pictures. I read all 212 pages that day and have managed to hang on to it for the last 58 years.

My love of history, especially the Civil War, began that day.  I've spent more time reading history than any other leisure pastime.  My parents took me to Gettysburg a year or two later and my wife, Terri and I have made multiple trips to Stones River, Chickamauga, Shiloh, and Vicksburg, as well as many smaller Civil War related sites.  Down the road, I received a history degree from Athens State University and went to grad school at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.  I credit that simply written children's book for awakening something in me I otherwise might have never known was there.  And the rest is history!