As the Fourth of July approaches, I find myself feeling deeply blessed despite living in harrowing times. I recognize my personal luck and good fortune. I have been granted health and longevity. And as I struggle to make sense of the present, I find myself often looking to the past for guidance.
My childhood was a time of great difficulty for the nation and the world, a Great Depression and a global fight for the future of humanity in the face of murderous fascism. But it was also a time of personal hope and growth. The world of that time was all I knew, and it helped forge me and my generation, as well as a nation that knew the dire threat of not being able to take peace and prosperity for granted.
I will continue to speak out and write about our time of crisis. I know the grim warnings of a country and a system of government coming apart. These fears are rooted in a disturbing reality. But I have personally lived through more than one third of this country’s history (a fact that stunned me and I had to double-check with my Texas arithmetic) and I have seen many moments of peril. Yet somehow the brilliance of our founding laws and traditions have allowed us to right the ship of state time and time again, even in rough seas, and even when we have had to chart new courses.
So today, I wish to share with you a personal story (apologies to those of you that have already read it in What Unites Us). These events took place on this date on the calendar, but many decades ago. Yet this story still embodies for me the precious but . I reflect with pause, humility, and a faith that that darkness can be replaced by light if we are willing to fight for our better angels.
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When I was a young boy, we didn’t have much in the way of material possessions. But around 1940 or ’41, we got our first family car — a heavily used 1938 Oldsmobile that I can still see so clearly in my mind’s eye. Its previous owner had lived along the Gulf of Mexico, and it was thus considered a “coastal car,” which meant it was rusted, especially along the lower-left side. Its engine had also thrown a rod, blowing a big hole in the engine block, which had been patched. It was a bit of a rolling wreck, but I didn’t see it as anything but beautiful.
In my neighborhood, the notion of a family vacation was an unheard-of luxury, something you might see in the movies but never expected to experience yourself. Yet that year, as the Fourth of July approached, my mother had the idea of driving to the beach in Galveston to see the fireworks over the Gulf of Mexico. My father was a little unsure of trusting the new car to take his young family on the round trip of roughly 100 miles, but my mother was persuasive. When the morning of the Fourth arrived, I was giddy with anticipation.
A trip from Houston to Galveston these days is relatively easy. At that time it was a big deal. There were no freeways, so we took the two-lane coastal road, and I remember how hot the day was. The humidity must have been approaching 100 percent. All the car windows were down, and to help the time pass, my mother had us sing patriotic songs. First and foremost was “America the Beautiful.” She always thought it should have been made the national anthem, as it is less militaristic than “The Star-Spangled Banner” and easier to sing. I have inherited that opinion. We did sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” too, however, and there was a debate in the car about whether we should stop so that we could get out and stand while we were singing. We ultimately decided that we should probably keep going, our hands over our hearts as we sang. As proud Texans, we included several state songs in our repertoire (“Texas, Our Texas,” “Beautiful Texas,” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas”). I remember singing my heart out, and we repeated the songs over and over again, stopping to make sure my little brother and sister could learn the lyrics.
When we finally arrived in Galveston, it seemed magical. I can still taste the salt air and see the sun flickering on the rippling water of the Gulf. As we all sat on the seawall that had been built after the great hurricane of 1900, I thought this work of civil engineering was so marvelous it might as well have been the Great Wall of China. We played on the beach, and when the sun went down, we watched the fireworks. In retrospect, this was probably a modest show — low budget and low altitude — but I was transfixed. I had never seen anything like it. I oohed and aahed at the starlit night. I knew, after all, that “the stars at night are big and bright deep in the heart of Texas.”
We had no money for the extravagances of a hotel, so the five of us slept in the car, curling up every which way. As we drove back the next morning, we were all a little stiff, but for that moment life seemed perfect. I have often wished I could have bottled that day to taste its sweet innocence once more. I had no way of knowing then that the country would soon be engulfed in war, and that some of the happy families we saw strolling the beach would have fathers go off to battle and never return. I didn’t know that I soon would be stricken by rheumatic fever and confined to my bed. And I couldn’t have anticipated that my parents, whom I can still picture sitting contentedly in the front seat, would pass away relatively early in my life. All I knew then was that I liked the feel of the road and the sight of the scenery going past. I liked going places . . . and I still do.