When it comes to math, I seldom have the ability to work math problems in my head. Ronnie somehow wound up with my mathematical skills, as well as his own. I guess that is one of the downsides of being a twin. Gifts and abilities aren’t always equally divided.
Perhaps that’s why God gave me four fingers and a thumb on each hand. In a bind, I can use them for counting. The year ’69 struck a chord with me. Surprisingly, I even had the ability to immediately make the deduction that this is the 50thsummer since then. Pretty clever, don’t you think?
I figure Ronnie getting my math skills was his loss and my gain. How’s that for a pun associated to numbers? As it turned out, my figurative skillset in use of the King’s English exceeded his. I almost wrote: “dramatically exceeded his”, but that might be an overstatement. He managed well enough. He didn’t need to be overly proficient in English to graduate with a degree in engineering. That’s where his having both his and my mathematical abilities tilted the scales in his favor.
Looking at the title of Elin Hilderbrand’s recently released book, my thoughts immediately went back in time. The problem with remembering the summer of ’69 is sorting out the details. As newly weds, both my life and the General’s had been filled with numerous changes since the summer of ’68.
In the summer of ’68, the month following completion of my junior year in college, the General and I became Mr. and Mrs. Don Forrester. Somewhere we still have the marriage license to prove it. I don’t think the General has burned it or fed it to a paper shredder. Though my motivation for promising to love her for better or worse for the remainder of my days wasn’t primarily to get a job, having a wife made it easier. The change in my marital status worked its charm. Even without the General having the ability to expertly play the piano, two months following our wedding, I was provided the opportunity to serve as pastor of a small church forty-five miles NW of Abilene.
As the summer of ’69 rolled around, the General and I made plans to radically alter our lives again by moving from the small rural community of less than a 100 people to the concrete jungle of the Dallas/Fort Worth area for me to attend seminary. That meant more radical changes in our lives.
Of course, when the church called me as pastor, they knew it was time limited. I was open about my academic plans for the fall of ’69. Maybe there was a method to their madness. A church can put up with almost anything for a year. In hindsight, that may have been their saving grace.
“Summer of ’69” – One of the first things that came to my mind when I saw the title of the book was that America put two astronauts on the moon in July ’69. I remember because the General and I were glued to the televised news broadcast. Neil Armstrong made a statement about one small step for man and a gigantic leap for mankind. At least that’s the way I’m remembering his expression half a century later.
Interestingly, although Elin Hilderbrand’s book “Summer of ‘69” is fiction, it will read as though it is non-fiction. She refers to it as the most tumultuous summer of the twentieth century. Hilderbrand writes about a family of siblings whose lives were dramatically changed by their inability to visit in their grandmother’s historic home in Nantucket the way they always had every other summer before. Life got in the way for them; the way life sometimes gets in our way and alters traditions and well-intentioned plans.
Reportedly, of the four siblings, one of the granddaughters was a nursing student, caught up in the vortex of civil rights protests, a passion that took her with her best friend to Martha’s Vineyard. Her best friend’s name was Mary Jo Kopechne.
Mary Jo Kopechne! – Could that really be right? Do you remember the death of Mary Jo Kopechne? The year had to be a mistake. The summer of ’69 couldn’t have been the year. That was the summer after I graduated from college. The story is too fresh in my memory to be half a century old. Yet, the reality is the accident occurred on July 18, the summer of ’69. The accident occurred two days before Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
It was a late night accident. According to one report: “Late on the night of July 18, 1969, a black Oldsmobile driven by U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy plunged off the Dike Bridge on the tiny island of Chappaquiddick, off Martha’s Vineyard, landing upside down in the tidal Poucha Pond. The 37-year-old Kennedy survived the crash, but the young woman riding with him in the car didn’t. Though newspaper headlines at the time identified her simply as a “blonde,” she was 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, a respected political operative who had worked on the presidential campaign of Senator Kennedy’s brother, Robert Kennedy.
“Kennedy later claimed he dove repeatedly ‘into the strong and murky current’ to try and find Kopechne before making his way back to the cottage. He then drove back to the scene with his cousin, Joseph Gargan, and aide Paul Markham, who both tried in vain to reach Kopechne”.
Neither Kennedy, nor the two men who reportedly subsequently attempted in vain to reach her, reported the accident to law enforcement. As a result, Mary Jo Kopechne remained underwater for some nine hours until her body was recovered the next morning.
The following week, the Senator pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury. He received a two-month suspended sentence. Later that day, on national television, Kennedy stated that he had not been driving under the influence of liquor and that he did not have, nor had he ever had, a private relationship with Kopechne.
Some questioned the lack of criminal proceedings. Reportedly, in order for there to be a charge of involuntary manslaughter, there needed to be proof that the Senator was impaired or negligent at the time. No such evidence existed. By the time law enforcement were notified, it was too late for an analysis or a finding of the facts.
In his memoir entitled: “True Compass” Kennedy wrote that his actions on the night of the accident were “inexcusable,” and that he “made terrible decisions”. He added: “My burden is nothing compared to [Kopechne’s] loss and the suffering her family had to endure. She didn’t deserve to be linked to me in a romantic way. She deserved better than that.” Kennedy’s memoire was published after his death.
The thought of the summer of ’69 takes me back in time. How about you? It was a very long time ago, but the memory lives on.
All My Best!
Don