A look back

I was born on October 7, 1945 at St. Vincent’s Infirmary in Little Rock, Arkansas. That makes me an age I never thought in a million years I would see and quite frankly I don’t know what to do with it. That’s because my life has been pretty structured up until my retirement and now it’s not structured at all.

I was brought home from the hospital to my folks’ house in Atkins, Arkansas, population 1391, about an hour west of Little Rock where my mom, dad, grandmother, aunt, uncle and great-grandmother all lived and I was the only child. My mom divorced my father shortly after I was born. He was a big shot at the University of Arkansas playing varsity baseball and belonging to Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and even though he fell in love with my mom because she was a teen-age fashion model, with him at the University and her in the small town of Atkins taking care of me, the marriage was almost doomed to fail. So with all these adults around, I was the only child and, because of that, people were often referring to me as being spoiled although I saw it as simply being loved.

My family was very religious, going to church every Sunday and so I got into that habit as well. Because of their religion, they were strict with me about the people I could hang out with and the places I could go and that sometimes led to a disagreement between us. I remember a time in high school when this older boy wanted me to go out cruising with him one night and my folks wouldn’t let me. When I asked why, my grandmother said “Regardless of what you think about this young man, we know he has a bad reputation because of some of the things he’s done and you have to always remember that you’re known by the company you keep.”

I’ve never forgotten that little piece of advice.

I was a little kid growing up but that didn’t stop me from having a love and passion for all things sports. I played and started at basketball, football and baseball in high school and loved every one of them. To me there’s nothing like the spirit of competition and besting your worthy opponents on the field of battle and when we diminish that experience by celebrating people who played but never won, it’s a disservice to those who did.

I was watching an HBO documentary on television the other night about a man returning to the Bronx in New York City where he and many other famous people grew up including General Colin Powell, Chazz Palmeiri, Rob Reiner and his dad Carl and Alan Alda who appeared with his mother.

They all spoke fondly, almost worshipfully, about their childhood there that they all explained it in similar terms. They talked about family, togetherness, love, admiration, respect and diversity, all of the things a lot of us encountered during childhood except for diversity. They reported there were people living in the Bronx back in the ’30s and ’40s that were from all over the world and you had to get along with them so you could get to know them. And when they GOT to know them, they discovered they had similar hopes and dreams to most other people living in the borough.

I didn’t have the privilege of diversity growing up. I grew up in the segregated South and only white people lived in my home town. There was a scattering of Germans who all belonged to the Catholic Church along with the Baptists, the largest congregation in town, the Methodists, the Presbyterians and the Pentecostal churches.

So I didn’t realize until I went to college that there was such a rainbow of races and ethnicities living in this country and I took it upon myself to learn as much about them as I could. Thankfully, that kept me from ever being prejudiced towards a group of people. I may not like a person because of what he does, how he talks or who he is but it never has anything to do with his race or ethnicity. It only has to do with him.

Oddly enough, as much as I loved my home life in Atkins, I was anxious to get away and see what the rest of the world was like so when I left Atkins for the University of Arkansas in the Fall of 1963 at the tender age of 17, I never went back to live there again. Of course I visited like all good children do and, in fact, visited as often as I could but never lived there again.

Most of you know the rest of my story as an adult so I won’t bore you with it again. I just thought it might be useful to know my backstory too so you have a better understanding of who I am and what I stand for and believe in.