This morning’s post about Tyler Childers’ song, “Long Violent History” ( see >> https://shorturl.at/qkjMb ), reminded me of a very long memo I uncovered three weeks ago while going through boxes in the basement.
A little background: My father, like Tyler Childers, is from Kentucky. Specifically, my father was from Pineville, Kentucky, the poorest town in the poorest section of the nation -- Eastern Kentucky.
In Pineville, my father was the son of the town drunk, and no family was poorer.
My father ran away from home at 14, never graduated from high school, and enrolled in the US Air Force.
Unbelievably, he passed his GED (a high school equivalency test) in the Azores, and got admitted and graduated from Princeton University.
He married my mom (and stayed married!), joined the U.S. foreign service, taught himself two languages (French and Arabic) and several instruments (trombone, piano, and bass), and traveled the world, living at various times in Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Mali, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.
He built a custom house and several apartments on Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C., taught himself to sail, and owned and drove a 1937 Bentley through Europe and North Africa.
He ran the American Association for the Advancement of Science's climate project back when no one was talking about global warming.
My father and mother also bought and gave a square mile of Pine Mountain to the state to help preserve Blanton Forest, one of the largest old growth forests on the East Coast.
In short, he was quite a guy. He came from less than nothing and became something.
In 1962, after posts in Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Southern Rhodesia, and Mali, my father returned to the US for a few weeks of “Home Leave,” which was ostensibly a time when American diplomats who were engaged in “telling America’s Story to the World” could come home and reorient themselves to what America was, and is always becoming.
The memo is a typewritten, single-spaced, and 20-page long racial travelog that stretches from Detroit, Michigan in the north to Oxford, Mississippi in the deep south.
My father took this trip to ground himself in the reality of American racism, which he had to occassionally explain to Africans who were themselves either newly free from white colonialism, or trying to get free from it themselves.
My father visits a White Citizens' Council meeting, local politicians, journalists and writers, and the Department of Justice lawyer defending James Meredith who was then attempting to be the first black man to integrate Old Miss.
Unknown to my father, while he was in Oxford, Mississippi, he was only a few blocks from my wife, who was then a 13 year old girl living next to the county club golf course where the National Guard helicopters landed this week in 1962.
I don’t really expect anyone to read this 20-page memo, but it’s family and national history — a time capsule written from the perspective of a once-impoverished small town white Kentuckian who himself was the benefit of an “affirmative action” program which got him admitted to Princeton.
How’s it related to dogs?
Well, a bit.
My Kentucky father wrote a book about Dr. Thomas Walker who is a descendant of ours. It was Thomas Walker who discovered Cumberland Gap, and who brought the second fox hound pack to the United States.
As for Tyler Childers, he too seems to know a bit about hounds, and even wrote a song about them (see >> https://shorturl.at/5wPas).
The 20-page memo (PDF) is here (Google Drive) >> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LCeCyHsK9B88AtN_wQqVDseJ3MK_FNUT/view?usp=drivesdk
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